At the Paris AI Action Summit, the Global South rises
On February 11, heads of state convened in Paris’s Grand Palais for the third AI Safety Summit, or the “AI Action Summit” as France has eponymized it. In contrast to the first summit in London in 2023 and the second in Seoul in 2024, the United States and the United Kingdom did not sign onto the communiqué this year. Instead, this week’s summit saw the breakdown of the agreement from Bletchley Park and the drift into the “third way” approach emphasizing strategic independence. With the United States’ cessation of partnerships in favor of leadership, the charge on affirmative technological sovereignty has gained ground.
What this has resulted in is the beginnings of a drift from traditional power centers toward a multi-stakeholder, collaborative approach on artificial intelligence (AI). With India as co-chair, the summit demonstrated that nations from the Global South are not just participants but architects of the emerging AI order. Newly announced initiatives and commitments to open-source development reflect a growing consensus that AI’s future must be both innovative and rooted in shared prosperity.