Vance, in First Foreign Speech, Tells Europe That U.S. Will Dominate A.I.

Vice President JD Vance told European and Asian leaders in Paris on Tuesday that the Trump Administration was adopting an aggressive, America First approach to the race to dominate all the building blocks of artificial intelligence, and warned Europeans to dismantle regulations and get aboard with Washington.

On his first foreign trip since taking office, Mr. Vance used his opening address at an A.I. summit meeting hosted by France and India to describe his vision of a coming era of American technological domination. Europe, he said, would be forced to chose between using American-designed and manufactured technology or siding with authoritarian competitors — a not-very-veiled reference to China — who would exploit the technology to their detriment.

“The Trump administration will ensure that the most powerful A.I. systems are built in the U.S. with American design and manufactured chips,” he said, quickly adding that “just because we are the leader doesn’t mean we want to or need to go it alone.”

But he said that for Europe to become what he clearly envisions as a junior partner, it must eliminate much of its digital regulatory structure — and much of its policing of the internet for what its governments define as disinformation.

For Mr. Vance, who is on a weeklong tour that will take him next to the Munich Security Conference, Europe’s premier meeting of leaders, foreign and defense ministers and others, the speech was clearly intended as a warning shot. It largely silenced the hall in a wing of the Grand Palais in the center of Paris. Leaders accustomed to talking about “guardrails” for emerging artificial intelligence applications and “equity” to assure the technology is available and comfortable for underserved populations heard none of those phrases from Mr. Vance.

He spoke only hours after President Trump put new 25 percent tariffs on foreign steel, essentially negating trade agreements with Europe and other regions. Mr. Vance’s speech, precisely composed and delivered with emphasis, seemed an indicator of the tone Mr. Trump’s national security leaders plan to take to Europe this week.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will be talking about Ukraine with European leaders on Wednesday, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrives in Munich when the conference opens at the end of the week. That session is likely to be dominated by competing American and European views on how to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.

With a brief background in Silicon Valley and venture capital, Mr. Vance is the image of a new generation of Republicans soaked in Mr. Trump’s America First ideology. After Mr. Vance left the hall, not staying to hear the European response, the United States and Britain declined to sign the summit’s communiqué.

Mr. Vance started off his speech with a direct reference to the A.I. Safety Summit, held at Bletchley Park, the grand estate in Britain where code-breakers cracked the German Enigma codes in World War II. That conference ended with a dire warning of “serious, even catastrophic harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these A.I. models.” Twenty-eight nations, including the U.S., vowed to “work together in an inclusive manner to ensure human-centric, trustworthy and responsible A.I.”

Mr. Vance went out of his way to separate himself from that summit and the speech given by his predecessor, Kamala Harris. “I’m not here this morning to talk about A.I. safety,” he said. “I’m hear to talk about A.I. opportunities,” warning that America’s response to the challenge of A.I. could no longer be “self-conscious” or “risk averse.”

“The A.I. future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” he said.

At a moment that Mr. Trump is disbanding government boards and units that were hunting down disinformation, much of it from Russia, China and Iran, Mr. Vance made the case that American technology firms were still dealing with “massive regulations” in Europe.

He did not propose scrapping all such rules but said, “It is one thing to prevent a predator from preying on a child on the internet, and it is something quite different to prevent a grown man or woman from accessing opinions that the government thinks is misinformation.”

Of course in Washington, that is exactly what many federal employees charge Mr. Trump is doing, as he orders all references to D.E.I. — diversity, equity and inclusion — stripped from government websites, and has banned government employees from putting their preferred personal pronouns in their signatures.

At the same time Mr. Vance warned about how “hostile foreign adversaries have weaponized A.I. software to rewrite history, surveillance users and…