PARIS >> An artificial intelligence race is heating up between the United States and China — but don’t count Europe out.

That was the pitch that President Emmanuel Macron of France made Monday as Paris hosted an AI summit, where government leaders, top tech executives and academic experts have gathered to discuss the hopes surrounding AI, as well as the fears of economic and societal disruption that the rapidly evolving technology has fueled.

“We are back in the race,” Macron said under the soaring steel and glass roof of the Grand Palais, the exhibition hall where France and India have teamed up to hold the summit.

Macron said it was crucial to develop artificial intelligence that was “at the service of humanity” and regulated to guard from dangerous pitfalls. But he also urged Europe to cut red tape, foster more AI startups and invest in computing abilities. Often, he said, Europe is too slow for investors.

“We will simplify,” Macron said. “At the national and European scale, it is very clear that we have to resynchronize with the rest of the world.”

Attendees at the summit, which runs through Tuesday, include Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI; Zhang Guoqing, China’s vice premier; and Vice President JD Vance, who is on his first trip overseas.

France sees the summit as a crucial moment to spur AI investment in Europe, to get consumers on board with the fast-moving technology and to position Europe as a top contender — not just a leading regulator — in a global competition where the United States and China are so far the biggest players.

“We want to take advantage of this summit to leverage and go faster,” said Macron, who extolled what he called the “Notre Dame strategy” — named after the successful reconstruction of the French capital’s fire-ravaged cathedral on a tight five-year deadline.

“We showed the rest of the world that, when we commit to a clear timeline, we can deliver,” he said.

At similar gatherings in other countries, the focus was often on AI’s potential risks in terms of economic upheaval, disinformation and national security — like a 2023 summit in Britain that warned of the technology’s potentially “catastrophic” harm.

Those concerns remain. “So much of the last decade has been a story of technology tearing us apart,” Fei-Fei Li, a professor of computer science at Stanford University and co-director at the university’s Human-Centered AI Institute, said in the summit’s opening comments. “AI is at another fork in this road.”

Christy Hoffman, the general secretary of the UNI Global Union, said that “there is a risk of AI turning into another engine of inequality, and people are concerned that it will further reduce their autonomy or replace them altogether.”

But the global mood has shifted as AI becomes widespread and countries jostle to build the technology’s next giant.

Last month, President Donald Trump announced the so-called Stargate initiative, which could eventually invest as much as $500 billion over the next four years in computing infrastructure to power AI. And China shocked the tech world with DeepSeek, a company that developed powerful artificial intelligence at a fraction of the cost of its American counterparts.

“If we want growth, jobs and progress, we have to allow innovators to innovate, builders to build and developers to develop,” Altman wrote in an opinion essay in the French newspaper Le Monde on Saturday. “The risk of inaction is too great to ignore.”

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)

Macron’s priority is ensuring that Europe does not fall behind the United States and China by overregulating its development.

He acknowledged the need for regulation — for instance, to protect intellectual property — but also pitched the benefits of AI, calling it “a formidable technological and scientific revolution for progress.”

“If we regulate before we innovate, we won’t have any innovation of our own,” Macron told France 2 television on Sunday.

Investors at the conference shared his view, but warned that Europe was not as competitive as the United States or China because it had layers of regulations, higher taxes and fewer financial incentives.

France, Macron argued, is well positioned to lead Europe’s AI push, partly because it gets about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy, allowing it to support power-hungry data centers without jeopardizing its climate change goals.

“I have a good friend on the other side of the ocean that says, ‘Drill, baby, drill,’” Macron said, referring to Trump’s pledge to make it easier to secure oil drilling leases in the United States. “Here there is no need to drill — it’s ‘plug, baby, plug.’”

Macron announced more than 100 billion euros in AI-related investments in France during the summit, including a deal with the United Arab Emirates to fund an AI data center and campus in France.