Key Takeaways from the 2025 Paris AI Action Summit: AI Fragmentation, Sovereignty, Competition, and Governance

The AI Action Summit, held in Paris on February 10-11, 2025, was co-hosted by India's Prime Minister Modi and France's President Macron. Unlike previous AI summits focused on safety, the Paris Summit emphasised a positive, public-interest view of AI. Amid rising tech competition and the DeepSeek-R1 launch fallout, Vice President Vance's speech highlighted global divisions on AI governance, with the US and UK notably absent from the 'Inclusive and Sustainable AI' declaration. The summit’s private sector focus sparked debates on AI sovereignty and the evolving role of public and private stakeholders. This article examines the key insights from the summit.