Roland Lescure, the French finance minister, urged European nations to accelerate AI development and ignore calls for a slowdown. Lescure stated that safety warnings from U.S. labs are a tactical effort to preserve their dominance in the field and prevent international competitors from catching up.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen recently expressed support for an AI slowdown and planned invitations to frontier labs for talks. This friction within the European Union highlights a divide between prioritizing regulatory caution and achieving technical parity with the United States.