French AI Summit Lays Groundwork for Business, Not Political Success
Billed as a setting for international governance, the event mostly delivered as a networking session
By and Benoit Berthelot
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Welcome to Tech In Depth, our revamped daily newsletter with reporting and analysis about the business of tech from Bloomberg's journalists around the world. Today, Yazhou Sun and Benoît Berthelot report from France's lukewarm AI summit and its busier sideline events.
Surprising Sony: Led by a new CEO, Sony reported a surprisingly upbeat holiday quarter. The Tokyo company sold 9.5 million PS5s, lifted its outlook and beat expectations for a double-digit profit decline with a slight improvement.
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Top artificial intelligence companies are rapidly expanding their lobbying footprint in Washington — and so far, Washington is turning out to be a very soft target. Two privately held AI companies, OpenAI and Anthropic — which once positioned themselves as cautious, research-driven counterweights to aggressive Big Tech firms — are now adding Washington staff, ramping up their lobbying spending and chasing contracts from the estimated $75 billion federal IT budget, a significant portion of which now focuses on AI. They have company. Scale AI, a specialist contractor with the Pentagon and other agencies, is also planning to expand its government relations and lobbying teams, a spokesperson told POLITICO. In late March, the AI-focused chipmaking giant Nvidia registered its first in-house lobbyists. AI lobbyists are 'very visible' and 'very present on the hill,' said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) in an interview at the Special Competitive Studies Project AI+ Expo this week. 'They're nurturing relationships with lots of senators and a handful of members [of the House] in Congress. It's really important for their ambitions, their expectations of the future of AI, to have Congress involved, even if it's only to stop us from doing anything.' This lobbying push aims to capitalize on a wave of support from both the Trump administration and the Republican Congress, both of which have pumped up the AI industry as a linchpin of American competitiveness and a means for shrinking the federal workforce. They don't all present a unified front — Anthropic, in particular, has found itself at odds with conservatives, and on Thursday its CEO Dario Amodei broke with other companies by urging Congress to pass a national transparency standard for AI companies — but so far the AI lobby is broadly getting what it wants. 'The overarching ask is for no regulation or for light-touch regulation, and so far, they've gotten that," said Doug Calidas, senior vice president of government affairs for the AI policy nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation. In a sign of lawmakers' deference to industry, the House passed a ten-year freeze on enforcing state and local AI regulation as part of its megabill that is currently working through the Senate. Critics, however, worry that the AI conversation in Washington has become an overly tight loop between companies and their GOP supporters — muting important concerns about the growth of a powerful but hard-to-control technology. 'There's been a huge pivot for [AI companies] as the money has gotten closer,' Gary Marcus, an AI and cognitive science expert, said of the leading AI firms. 'The Trump administration is too chummy with the big tech companies, and basically ignoring what the American people want, which is protection from the many risks of AI.' Anthropic declined to comment for this story, referring POLITICO to its March submission to the AI Action Plan that the White House is crafting after President Donald Trump repealed a sprawling AI executive order issued by the Biden administration. OpenAI, too, declined to comment. This week several AI firms, including OpenAI, co-sponsored the Special Competitive Studies Project's AI+ Expo, an annual Washington trade show that has quickly emerged as a kind of bazaar for companies trying to sell services to the government. (Disclosure: POLITICO was a media partner of the conference.) They're jostling for influence against more established government contractors like Palantir, which has been steadily building up its lobbying presence in D.C. for years, while Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft — major tech platforms with AI as part of their pitch — already have dozens of lobbyists in their employ. What the AI lobby wants is a classic Washington twofer: fewer regulations to limit its growth, and more government contracts. The government budget for AI has been growing. Federal agencies across the board — from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to the IRS and the Department of Veterans Affairs — are looking to build AI capacity. The Trump administration's staff cuts and automation push is expected to accelerate the demand for private firms to fill the gap with AI. For AI, 'growth' also demands energy and, on the policy front, AI companies have been a key driver of the recent push in Congress and the White House to open up new energy sources, streamline permitting for building new data centers and funnel private investment into the construction of these sites. Late last year, OpenAI released an infrastructure blueprint for the U.S. urging the federal government to prepare for a massive spike in demand for computational infrastructure and energy supply. Among its recommendations: creating special AI zones to fast-track permits for energy and data centers, expanding the national power grid and boosting government support for private investment in major energy projects. Those recommendations are now being very closely echoed by Trump administration figures. Last month, at the Bitcoin 2025 Conference in Las Vegas, David Sacks — Trump's AI and crypto czar — laid out a sweeping vision that mirrored the AI industry's lobbying goals. Speaking to a crowd of 35,000, Sacks stressed the foundational role of energy for both AI and cryptocurrency, saying bluntly: 'You need power.' He applauded President Donald Trump's push to expand domestic oil and gas production, framing it as essential to keeping the U.S. ahead in the global AI and crypto race. This is a huge turnaround from a year ago, when AI companies faced a very different landscape in Washington. The Biden administration, and many congressional Democrats, wanted to regulate the industry to guard against bias, job loss and existential risk. No longer. Since Trump's election, AI has become central to the conversation about global competition with China, with Silicon Valley venture capitalists like Sacks and Marc Andreessen now in positions of influence within the Trump orbit. Trump's director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy is Michael Kratsios, former managing director at Scale AI. Trump himself has proudly announced a series of massive Gulf investment deals in AI. Sacks, in his Las Vegas speech, pointed to those recent deal announcements as evidence of what he called a 'total comprehensive shift' in Washington's approach to emerging technologies. But as the U.S. throws its weight behind AI as a strategic asset, critics warn that the enthusiasm is muffling one of the most important conversations about AI: its ability to wreak unforeseen harm on the populace, from fairness to existential risk concerns. Among those concerns: bias embedded in algorithmic decisions that affect housing, policing, and hiring; surveillance that could threaten civil liberties; the erosion of copyright protections, as AI models hoover up data and labor protections as automation replaces human work. Kevin De Liban, founder of TechTonic Justice, a nonprofit that focuses on the impact of AI on low income communities, worries that Washington has abandoned its concerns for AI's impact on citizens. 'Big Tech gets fat government contracts, a testing ground for their technologies, and a liability-free regulatory environment,' he said, of Washington's current AI policy environment. 'Everyday people are left behind to deal with the fallout.' There's a much larger question, too, which dominated the early AI debate: whether cutting-edge AI systems can be controlled at all. These risks, long documented by researchers, are now taking a back seat in Washington as the conversation turns to economic advantage and global competition. There's also the very real concern that if an AI company does bring up the technology's worst-case scenarios, it may find itself at odds with the White House itself. Anthropic CEO Amodei said in a May interview that labor force disruptions due to AI would be severe — which triggered a direct attack from Sacks, Trump's AI czar, on his podcast, who said that line of thinking led to 'woke AI.' Still, both Anthropic and OpenAI are going full steam ahead. Anthropic hired nearly a dozen policy staffers in the last two months, while OpenAI similarly grew its policy office over the past year. They're also pushing to become more important federal contractors by getting critical FedRAMP authorizations — a federal program that certifies cloud services for use across government — which could unlock billions of dollars in contracts. As tech companies grow increasingly cozy with the government, the political will to regulate them is fading — and in fact, Congress appears hostile to any efforts to regulate them at all. In a public comment in March, OpenAI specifically asked the Trump administration for a voluntary federal framework that overrides state AI laws, seeking 'private sector relief' from a patchwork of state AI bills. Two months later, the House added language to its reconciliation bill that would have done exactly that — and more. The provision to impose a 10 year moratorium on state AI regulations passed the House but is expected to be knocked out by the Senate parliamentarian. (Breaking ranks again, Anthropic is lobbying against the moratorium.) Still, the provision has widespread support amongst Republicans and is likely to make a comeback.
