US Vice President J.D. Vance has called on the nations of the world to ensure that artificial intelligence does not become a tool for government-imposed censorship, encouraging the embrace of what he calls “a new industrial revolution.”
Mr. Vance was addressing world leaders at a recent Artificial Intelligence Summit in Paris.
In a sharp rebuke to European Union member nations, he warned that “excessive regulation” could cripple the rapidly growing AI industry.
Mr. Vance condemned the EU’s Digital Services Act and “the massive regulations it created about taking down content and policing so-called misinformation.”
Last month, President Trump signed an executive order designed to ensure that American AI systems are “free from ideological bias and engineered social agendas.”
Around the same time, the EU announced that it would ramp up enforcement of the Digital Services Act.
The Act requires social media companies to remove “illegal content” or face penalties as high as 6% of their global annual turnover.
EU lawmakers claim the measure is necessary to combat “foreign interference” and “hate speech.”
Critics say it’s censorship.
The Christian Post reports that Mr. Vance stated the US feels “very strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship.”
He pledged the US would “never restrict our citizens’ right to free speech.”
“We can trust our people to think, to consume information, to develop their own ideas and to debate with one another in the open marketplace of ideas.”
He voiced concern about “reports that some foreign governments are considering tightening the screws on US tech companies with international footprints.”
“America cannot and will not accept that, and we think it’s a terrible mistake not just for the US, but for your own countries,” he asserted at the summit.
He acknowledged the importance of ensuring that “the internet is a safe place,” but contended “it is one thing to prevent a predator from preying on a child on the internet and it is something quite different to prevent a grown man or woman from accessing an opinion that the government thinks is misinformation.”
The US was noticeably absent from an international document signed by more than 60 nations, including China, making the Trump administration an outlier in a global pledge to promote responsible AI development.
The document pledged to “promote AI accessibility to reduce digital divides” and “ensure AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure, and trustworthy.”
It also called for “making AI sustainable for people and the planet” and protecting “human rights, gender equality, linguistic diversity, consumer rights, and intellectual property.”
The United Kingdom also declined to sign the pledge.
Although he didn’t mention China or its new AI entity DeepSeek by name, the vice president said “foreign hostile adversaries have weaponised AI software to rewrite history, surveil users and censor speech.”
“Some authoritarian regimes have stolen and used AI to strengthen their military, intelligence and surveillance capabilities, capture foreign data and create propaganda to undermine other nations’ national security,” he said.
“This administration will block such efforts full-stop.”
The Christian Post reported Mr. Vance displayed a positive tone toward the idea of AI and what he described as the “extraordinary prospect of a new industrial revolution.”
But he warned that such a scenario would never come to fruition “if we allow AI to be dominated by massive players looking to use the tech to censor or control users’ thoughts.”
