Roland Lescure, France's finance minister, called for a rapid increase in European artificial intelligence development to counter the dominance of American firms. He characterized proposals to slow down AI progress as a ploy by U.S. labs to ensure they remain in the top position and advised Europe to accelerate instead. Lescure stated that France should ignore the push for limits to avoid ceding competitive ground to foreign rivals.

EU President Ursula von der Leyen recently backed an AI slowdown and plans to invite frontier laboratories to talks. The disagreement highlights internal European tension over whether limiting compute expenditure for researchers at firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic would help the region catch up or simply solidify the existing American lead.