America Accelerates on AI: What About France?

The America's AI Action Plan unveils an ambitious strategy for the United States: technological dominance, deregulation, massive investments in infrastructure and training, all centered on national security and economic competitiveness. Facing this offensive, France and Europe have a card to play, but it is a different one.

The American Strategy: Speed and Power

A Three-Pillar Action Plan

The American plan rests on three clearly defined strategic axes:

1. Accelerate innovation: develop the most powerful AI systems in the world by creating an environment favorable to private innovation, with an explicit rejection of excessive regulation.
2. Protect innovations: secure commercial and government innovations against risks, in collaboration with industry.
3. Lead international AI diplomacy: promote the global adoption of American AI systems, strengthen alliances, and prevent rivals from benefiting from American innovation.

Deregulation as a Driver

Executive Order 14179 and several subsequent executive orders aim to remove regulatory barriers deemed as obstacles to innovation. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has issued a call to businesses to identify federal regulations that hinder AI adoption. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been tasked with reviewing its investigations to ensure they do not slow innovation. The use of open-source and open-weight models is explicitly encouraged.

Massive Infrastructure Investment

AI requires colossal infrastructure: chip factories, data centers, and above all new energy sources. The American plan provides for simplified construction permits for data centers and energy infrastructure, upgrading the electrical grid (one of the largest and most complex in the world), and interconnecting reliable energy sources (geothermal, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion).

The comparison with China is explicit in the plan: since the 1970s, American energy capacity has stagnated, while China has rapidly developed its electrical grid.

Training and Workforce

Several executive orders aim to prepare the American workforce for the AI era:

• Integration of AI into educational programs and vocational training
• Creation of an AI Workforce Research Hub to assess the impact of AI on the labor market
• AI talent exchange program between federal agencies
• Hackathons to identify and recruit top talent

National Security and Control

The security component is omnipresent: evaluation of Chinese models, intelligence gathering on foreign AI projects, strict export controls on semiconductors, creation of high-security data centers, and measures to counter Chinese influence in international AI governance organizations.

What About France?

Facing this strategy of domination through speed and power, France and Europe cannot (and probably should not) follow the same path. American subsidies of this magnitude are not sustainable in the European context, and AI services based exclusively on American infrastructure risk becoming expensive in the long run, with growing technological dependence.

Sovereign AI

The first challenge is sovereignty: total control over data, GDPR compliance, technological independence. French companies and institutions that entrust their data to services hosted in the United States expose themselves to legal and strategic risks that the American Cloud Act makes very real.

Economically Viable AI

American investments are massive, but the question of their long-term profitability remains open. For French SMEs and mid-size companies, the challenge is to have accessible and affordable AI tools, without depending on subsidies or introductory pricing that inevitably increases.

Ecological AI

A point remarkably absent from the American plan: the ecological footprint. AI consumes enormous amounts of energy, and the American strategy relies on building new energy capacity rather than optimization. France and Europe can differentiate themselves by integrating energy optimization from the design stage.

Accessible AI

The tools developed by Big Tech companies are designed for organizations at their scale. French SMEs and mid-size companies need solutions adapted to their resources, simple to deploy and maintain, that do not require fifty-person data science teams.

What We Can Build

Europe has the technical competence, regulatory rigor (GDPR has become a global reference), and a culture of innovation that values quality and sustainability. Rather than trying to replicate the American model, we can build AI that combines innovation, responsibility, and inclusion.

This requires concrete building blocks: sovereign AI solutions for French companies, capable of competing internationally while respecting our values, our legal framework, and our budget constraints.

Conclusion

The United States wants to define global AI standards through speed and power. This is an approach consistent with their resources and culture. But France and Europe have a different card to play: that of sovereign, ethical, ecological, and accessible AI. This is not a fallback position; it is an alternative vision that addresses real needs and may well prove more sustainable.