JD Vance

JD Vance (born 1984) is the Vice President of the United States. He rose to fame with his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” worked in venture capital under Peter Thiel, represented Ohio in the Senate from 2023, and took office as Donald Trump’s vice president in January 2025 — quickly becoming the administration’s most prominent voice on AI.

The Paris speech

On February 11, 2025, at the AI Action Summit in Paris, Vance delivered what may be the most consequential pro-acceleration speech ever given by a sitting official. He pointedly refused the safety framing of earlier summits, warned Europe that “excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off,” and laid out four planks: American AI as the global gold standard, light-touch regulation, AI free of ideological bias, and a pro-worker growth path.

The speech landed as a deliberate rupture: the US and UK declined to sign the summit’s declaration, and European officials read it as the end of the post-Bletchley safety consensus. Together with David Sacks, the White House AI czar, Vance has since anchored a policy posture that treats the AI race with China as the organizing fact and safety institutionalism as a drag on it.

Vance frames his optimism in populist terms — AI as “the most significant breakthroughs in a generation” for workers, medicine, and industry — a notable evolution for a politician who built his brand on skepticism of Big Tech, and who still couples AI boosterism with hostility toward the largest incumbent platforms.