✨⏩ JD Vance offers an accelerationist AI vision in Paris

The veep offered world leaders and CEOs at the AI Action Summit an Up Wing message about technology empowering workers, not erasing them

My fellow pro-growth Up Wingers,

Imagine an alternate (but not too dissimilar) Earth where a populist US president — one whose campaign benefitted from anti-trade voters allergic to economic disruption — dispatches his young vice president to a high-profile Paris summit. There, global leaders and technology executives discuss what to make of rapid advances in artificial intelligence.

In this other reality, let’s call it Earth Two, the Financial Times covered the VPOTUS speech this way (with an assist from ChatGPT):

Tech Titans Face Trumpian Pushback in Paris

Leila Abboud and Melissa Heikkilä in Paris | 7 HOURS AGO

The contrast could hardly have been sharper. In the gilded halls of Paris's Palais des Congrès, where rich country leaders and tech luminaries had gathered to extol artificial intelligence's promise, America's vice-president arrived bearing a pitchfork. At the AI Action Summit, JD Vance delivered what amounts to a declaration of war on Silicon Valley's breakneck AI development.

Vance's pugnacious proposals represent a dramatic extension of his boss’s economic populism into the technological arena. Beyond mere rhetoric about "elites" and "coastal billionaires" — standard fare from President Donald Trump — the new administration is now proposing unprecedented interventions: forced deceleration of AI development, profit-sharing schemes to fund worker retraining, and mandatory investment in America's heartland.

The reaction was predictable. Sam Altman of OpenAI declared the proposals "catastrophic for innovation." Emmanuel Macron, playing host, searched for diplomatic middle ground. Yet the summit highlighted an emerging reality: the next chapter of America's populist experiment may be fought on the AI battleground.

Here on Earth One, however, Vance’s first foreign mission didn’t go down anything like that. Whatever your overall opinion of the Trump administration and its initial policy actions, there’s a whole lot to like in the speech Vance actually gave in the City of Lights. He pretty much ticked all the mainstream AI accelerationist boxes: