Paris AI Action Summit closes with 60 signatories and no US or UK signature

The summit

The AI Action Summit was held in Paris on 10 and 11 February 2025, co-hosted by France and India^[1]. It brought countries and international organisations together to discuss how artificial intelligence is built and governed, and it closed with a written statement that participants could put their names to.

The statement and who signed it

Sixty countries and international organisations signed a statement on inclusive and sustainable artificial intelligence for people and the planet^[1]. The United States and the United Kingdom were not among the signatories^[1]. On a document of this kind, a signature means that the country or organisation concerned has attached its name to the text and associates itself with what it says; those that stay off the list are not counted among its supporters.

What the signatories set out

The statement listed priorities. One was improving the accessibility of AI so as to reduce the digital divide — the gap between people and communities that have usable access to a technology and those that do not^[1]. Another was ensuring that AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy^[1].

Signatories also called for AI deployment that benefits future labour markets, and for stronger international coordination on governance^[1]. Governance here refers to the rules, institutions and practices through which AI is overseen: who writes the rules, who applies them, and how problems are identified and answered.

The statement further recognised the need for a network of observatories to better understand AI's impact on the job market^[1]. An observatory in this sense is a body that follows developments, gathers evidence and publishes what it finds, so that shifts in employment can be tracked rather than guessed at. A network implies several such bodies working in a coordinated way, which is what makes the proposal more than a single country's monitoring effort.

Alongside the statement

Participants launched a large public-interest AI platform and incubator to address the digital divide^[1]. An incubator is an arrangement that supports early-stage projects with resources and guidance until they can operate on their own. Public-interest work of this sort is aimed at uses that a purely commercial market may not supply. Participants also discussed AI and energy^[1], a pairing that links the technology to the power its computation consumes.

What the meeting left behind

The summit's written output gathered several strands into one text: access and the digital divide, openness and trustworthiness, effects on labour markets, and the coordination of governance across borders. The list of those willing to sign that text ran to sixty countries and international organisations, and it did not include the United States or the United Kingdom^[1]. Alongside the text, the meeting produced a concrete initiative — the public-interest platform and incubator — and a proposal for a network of observatories on employment. Those three things, a declaration, a launched platform and a proposed monitoring network, are what the Paris meeting left for the work that follows.