French President Urges US to Share Cutting-Edge AI and Democracies to Cooperate on Regulation

Emmanuel Macron has issued a heartfelt plea to the United States: please share your cutting-edge artificial intelligence with your democratic allies, and let's all cooperate on meaningful regulation. It's a noble aspiration, one that echoes the surreal tableaux from the G7 summit we recently covered, where AI chief executives were seated as heads of state while actual elected leaders looked on. Asking nicely—the time-honoured strategy for getting tech monopolists to voluntarily give up their advantages—has worked so well in the past, hasn't it? This time, surely, will be different.

Macron specifically urged "wealthy democracies" to work together on regulation, presumably because the current patchwork of toothless guidelines, voluntary commitments, and after-the-fact wrist-slaps has been so effective. The United States has been hoarding cutting-edge AI models like a dragon guarding a golden hoard, and Macron thinks a polite diplomatic note will pry open the vault. He's asking for cooperation in a domain where the global gold rush is already well underway, and the most aggressive players—both corporate and state-backed—have absolutely no interest in waiting for a consensus to form. The irony is almost too rich to digest.

So here we stand: a French president making a perfectly reasonable request to a US administration that can't even agree on what "cutting-edge" means internally, let alone how to share it with allies. Democracies are supposed to cooperate, but the labs building the most capable systems operate in a regulatory vacuum of their own making. The plea is noble; the outcome will almost certainly be more of the same—fine words, no binding action, and a world where AI power concentrates further into fewer hands. Pass the popcorn. Maybe a cheap French wine to go with it.