February 13, 2025

France Pursues an AI “Third Way”

By: Pablo Chavez

AI sovereignty emerged as an essential theme of the Paris AI Action Summit. Shortly before the summit started, President Emmanuel Macron stated that one of France’s strategic goals is to achieve technological sovereignty in AI.

Some of this isn’t new.

This AI third way is not AI sovereignty in a traditional sense, which at a high level is a nation’s policy of placing the development, deployment, and control of AI models, infrastructure, and data in the hands of domestic actors.

In 2021, France spearheaded efforts to establish “cloud sovereignty,” which eventually mandated stringent security and ownership restrictions on specific data centers owned by foreign companies in France. Since then – but especially since the public launch of Open Ai ChatGPT – France and the EU have attempted to enhance European AI capabilities through model development and compute infrastructure. Most recently, the EU announced its support for the OpenEuroLLM project, which aims to develop and deploy European open-source AI models trained primarily on European-owned supercomputers.

However, two elements of Macron’s advocacy for European AI sovereignty look new and noteworthy.

Read the full article on CEPA.

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