The 9 AI power players at Macron’s Paris summit (2025)

More than 1,000 artificial intelligence experts, thinkers, investors, regulators and doers are swarming Paris this week for two days of talks about what the technology can and should do. POLITICO runs down some of the big names shaping the debate.

France's AI hopeful

Arthur Mensch embodies France’s hopes for a breakthrough in the cutthroat world of AI.

The 32-year-old, who co-founded and leads startup Mistral AI, has forged strong connections with the French public sector and French President Emmanuel Macron, working on the country's AI strategy and voicing the concerns of AI companies about regulation.

Mensch has repeatedly asked for European Union rules on AI to be more flexible, even after pushing for an "innovation-friendly" framework as the law was being agreed. That outreach seems to have had some success, with EU officials now agreeing to simplify some of their requirements.

Trying to be a European AI success — with an eye toward an eventual initial public offering to raise funds from investors — involves a complicated balancing act. Mistral AI has tried to build partnerships in France with state-owned news agency AFP and with the French army.

But Mensch, a former alumni of Google DeepMind, has also forged bonds across the Atlantic, with a growing team in the U.S. and with U.S. investment. Last year the company struck a distribution pact with Microsoft's cloud business Azure, sparking a debate on whether European AI companies can or should remain independent of the Big Tech titans that lead AI.

OpenAI’s euro-fixer: Sandro Gianella

Shortly after OpenAI stepped into the global spotlight with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the company knew it had to bring in a tech policy master and a safe pair of hands to run its operations in Europe.

They chose Sandro Gianella, who had learned the ropes at both a U.S. Big Tech firm (Google) and a European upstart (Irish-American payment handler Stripe).

Gianella started work in June 2023 at a critical moment, as European legislators were trying to land the EU’s AI Act, the globe’s first-ever binding AI rulebook, with calls to include specific rules for general-purpose AI models such as that of OpenAI.

Gianella is not your average suit-and-tie Brussels tech lobbyist. Having embraced the post-pandemic remote work culture, he can often be found in the picturesque Bavarian Alps near Munich. His social media feeds are about AI, to be sure, but he posts just as much about bike or ski trips in the Alps.

Those diverse interests might help him balance a frantic OpenAI work stream while juggling scrutiny from several European capitals. Brussels has been drafting a voluntary code of practice for general-purpose AI models, while Paris and London have also been keen to develop their own AI efforts and rein in potential risks, including scrutiny of OpenAI’s links to Microsoft.

The AI seer: Geoffrey Hinton

Cited as one of the godfathers of AI for his work on artificial neural networks, Hinton shocked the AI world in May 2023 by quitting Google to speak about the existential risk of artificial intelligence. The computer scientist said he had changed his mind about the technology after seeing its rapid progress, and began touring the world to warn of the dire threats it posed to humanity. That mission included briefing U.K. government ministers on the societal impacts that would result if AI systems evolved beyond human control.

“He was very compelling,” said one person who was briefed. Hinton's warnings helped convince then-U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to launch the world’s first AI Safety Institute and hold an AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park.

AI doomers have since lost the argument on trying to slow down the technology’s development, but the 77-year-old continues to beat the existential risk drum. The Nobel Prize winner (in physics) will be in Paris speaking at side events.

The AI open-source advocate: Yann LeCun

Even though he works for Silicon Valley giant Meta as its chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun is a pillar of the French AI ecosystem. An early AI pioneer, he’s been a lifelong advocate of open source, an open and collaborative form of software development that contrasts with closed proprietary models developed by AI star OpenAI and others .

LeCun plays an influential role at Meta, with his hand visible in the company's 2015 opening of the FAIR artificial intelligence laboratory in Paris. The launch was a first for France at the time, and was motivated by LeCun's conviction that the French capital was home to a pool of untapped talent.

Almost 10 years later, corporate alumni from that laboratory have seeded themselves across European AI. Antoine Bordes, who was the co-managing director of FAIR, works for the defense startup Helsing, while another former employee, Timothée Lacroix, is now Mistral AI’s co-founder and chief technology officer.

LeCun is also an enthusiastic cheerleader for the technology, and could be seen walking around Paris with his AI-powered Ray Ban glasses even as Meta hesitated to release them in Europe due to regulatory concerns.

LeCun has never been an AI doomer and argues that an open-source approach can ensure AI evolves in a way that benefits humanity, even if it's also been viewed as beneficial to China, where open source helped fuel the creation of the DeepSeek chatbot. LeCun's open-source advocacy has seen him joust with SpaceX founder Elon Musk on social media before Meta's current turn to embrace the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

The UK's AI whisperer: Matt Clifford

Matt Clifford is the U.K. government’s go-to brain on all matters tech. He chairs the country’s moonshot funding agency ARIA, helped set up the U.K. AI Safety Institute under the last government, and is now advising the new government on implementing an “AI Opportunities Action Plan” that he authored.

He played a crucial role in the first AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in November 2023, jetting across the world as then-PM Sunak’s representative.

After that, the former McKinsey consultant returned to his day job as an early-stage investor in tech firms; when Sunak’s government fell at last year’s election, the new Labour administration came calling.

The 39-year-old had several chats with the country’s technology secretary, Peter Kyle, which led to his being tasked with creating an AI Action Plan for them over the summer. That plan was finally released in January and will be the blueprint for British AI policy; the government accepted all 50 of its recommendations, and Kyle is now advising No.10 once a week on implementing it.

With no other tech specialist close to No.10, Clifford’s star keeps rising.

While the Bradford-born Clifford is affable and doesn’t take payment for his government work, he has been the subject of briefings against him for perceived conflicts of interest. His recommendation that the copyright regime be reformed has drawn particular ire from publishers and rights holders.

The AI regulator: Killian Gross

Last year the European Union became a global trendsetter by adopting its AI Act, a binding rulebook regulating the highest-risk AI systems. European Commission veteran Kilian Gross has been one of the key figures in ensuring the law is rolled out swiftly.

Gross leads the AI regulation and compliance unit inside the Commission’s AI Office, a key group that will determine the fate of the AI Act. While AI Office boss Lucilla Sioli is the Commission’s face to a broader audience on anything related to AI regulation, Gross is never too far away to jump in when things get technical.

Gross was trained as a competition lawyer, but in his quarter century at the EU executive he has also worked on policies such as digital, energy, taxation and state aid. He also advised Germany's Energy and Housing Commissioner Günther Oettinger.

Tech lobbyists say Gross has been running around Brussels to meet with tech companies or industry lobby groups, either to explain the rules or to listen to their complaints about how burdensome they are. His nerves could be tested to the limit over the next 18 months as the EU’s AI rulebook gradually takes effect.

The AI scientist: Yoshua Bengio

While policymakers regulate how AI companies deal with the risks of the technology, the step before that — identifying those risks — is the playground of Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio.

One of the “godfathers of AI,” together with Hinton and LeCun, Bengio is an influential voice in the debate over the risks of AI and potential responses to them.

In the lead-up to the Paris summit, Bengio led work on an AI safety report authored by 96 scientists, which will be a focus of debate in Paris. His message: Before we can start addressing the risks, we need to crack open the AI boxes and require that companies provide more transparency about how their AI models work.

Bengio is also being tapped for regulatory work. The European Commission’s AI Office has named him as one of the academic experts who will draft a set of voluntary rules for the most advanced general-purpose AI models. That initiative, however, is now in peril after Google and Meta attacked how the rules are drafted.

The AI dissident: Meredith Whittaker

As an influential AI ethics researcher at Google, Meredith Whittaker urged that the company do more about AI's potential harms. Now, as head of the non-profit foundation behind encrypted messaging app Signal and an adviser to the AI Now Institute, she remains a powerful voice calling Big Tech to account and countering some of the AI hype.

Whittaker quit Google in 2019 after leading a series of walkouts to protest workplace misconduct. She has since warned that existing AI systems can include biased datasets that entrench racial and gender biases — an issue that requires immediate action by regulators.

She also campaigned against attempts to break encryption and warned of the market power of a handful of U.S. companies over AI. Until recently she even had a role counseling regulators as a senior adviser on AI to Lina Khan, who chaired the U.S. Federal Trade Commission from 2021 to 2025.

The AI president: Emmanuel Macron

French President Emmanuel Macron may be struggling to form a government but he hasn't abandoned his ambition to be the brains behind France's — and Europe's — AI strategy.

As host of the AI Action Summit in Paris, the French president has been hard at work pushing European countries to adopt a more aggressive innovation strategy that could help draw investment. He has also stepped up talks with French and European business leaders and researchers to show off what France can do for AI.

Macron's interest in AI is not new. Back in 2018 he launched a national AI strategy, entitled "AI for Humanity," aimed at positioning France as a world leader and funding AI research, innovation and training.

That ambition has now shifted up a gear, especially since Washington announced the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure. Macron is pushing hard to help French companies and above all the country's great hope, Mistral AI, which Paris is counting on to rival OpenAI.

At the same time, Macron also wants to make Paris a platform for global talks on universal access to AI, as Europe tries to find a space in a tech race dominated by the U.S. and China. Here he has tried to pull in new allies, even reaching out to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to co-chair the Paris AI Summit.