France is hosting a global artificial intelligence summit that costs far less than the U.K.’s 2023 affair.
PARIS — France aims to outshine Britain’s Artificial Intelligence Summit in at least one respect: It’s going to be a lot cheaper.
The French capital’s glass-vaulted Grand Palais will gather around 100 heads of state and the leading lights of the AI industry, including OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman, Mistral AI boss Arthur Mensch and Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun on Feb. 10 and 11.
Running the event will cost €13 million, according to a preparatory document for the 2025 budget analyzed by POLITICO.
That’s just over a third of what the earlier U.K. summit cost.
Public spending is a tense issue in France where a minority government is fighting to get budget plans passed amid loud opposition to efforts to wrangle a significant deficit.
But cut-price major events are also becoming a Parisian point of pride after it delivered one of the lowest-cost Olympic Games in two decades last year.
Less than Bletchley Park
This year’s event aims to be thrifty compared with its U.K. predecessor, held at the end of 2023.
« It was a request: to do it cheaper than the British, » confirms one of the Paris summit’s envoys.
That first AI Safety Summit cost £27.7 million, or just over €33 million.
The British chose a symbolic location for the occasion: Bletchley Park, 50 minutes (by train) north of London. It was here that Alan Turing used his Enigma machine to break the secret codes of the Nazis during the Second World War.
The site was too small for a global summit, forcing organizers to build new reception facilities.
France wants to avoid this by locating its summit at the Grand Palais, a grandiose venue built to host the 1900 Paris Exposition, and in several public buildings across the Paris region, including the Institut Polytechnique for science-themed events on Feb. 6 and 7 and the national library — Bibliothèque nationale de France — and the Conciergerie for the cultural weekend on Feb. 8 and 9.
Sharing the cost
The European Commission chipped in with €2 million and the French government has also solicited a number of sponsors, according to a French summit official granted anonymity to speak freely.
France is putting €11 million on the table. The foreign ministry, which is in charge of the event, is contributing €2 million, with much of that earmarked for welcoming world leaders.
The economy ministry is the biggest contributor, handing over €3 million to help showcase France’s attractiveness to investors. The ministry of the armed forces, which will be holding its own event, has also contributed €1.5 million.
The culture ministry has put forward €1 million, staff to coordinate the summit and locations for the event, such as the library at the Grand Palais. Several other ministries are also contributing to a lesser extent.
There’s still one factor that’s hard to assess: the full cost of security for the event provided by the interior ministry.
With high-level envoys like U.S. Vice President JD Vance, India’s Narendra Modi and Ding Xuexiang, the Chinese vice premier, this could still rack up a significant bill.
