A “strategic domain”: Emmanuel Macron convenes a defence and security council on AI

Artificial intelligence is making its way to the top of the state. This Wednesday, October 14, Emmanuel Macron convened a Defence and National Security Council entirely devoted to AI, the Élysée announced.The meeting is being held at the conclusion of the Council of Ministers meeting. For the Élysée, the issue is now just as strategic as the space or nuclear industries.

“Just as space and nuclear power, artificial intelligence has become a strategic field raising major national security and sovereignty issues”, says the Élysée in a press release.

For reference, a National Defence and Security Council is a restricted meeting bringing together the country’s highest-ranking civilian and military officials. Chaired by the head of state, it enables the most sensitive defence and security issues to be addressed. Among those around the table at this first council dedicated to AI will be Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, Minister of the Armed Forces Catherine Vautrin, and Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces General Fabien Mandon.

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AI risks on the agenda

This council, announced to the press at the last minute, is intended to enable “an examination of the security issues associated with the development and uses of this technology, for both public and private actors, as well as the state’s priorities at the national and European levels”, explains the Élysée. This defence council is part of a series of meetings devoted to new threats.The meeting at the French state summit takes place approximately one month after a defence council meeting on “hybrid attacks” in Europe, which were attributed to Russia.

The council meeting follows the UN Security Council meeting devoted to AI. On that occasion, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and his main rival, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, spoke and exchanged views with UN officials. It was the very first time the UN Security Council had considered the advent of artificial intelligence.

“A servant, not a master”

Emmanuel Macron has weighed in repeatedly on AI in recent months. At the end of September, he took advantage of Pope Leo XIV’s visit to France to advocate for an “international organization” that must prevent the most high-performing AI models from being reserved for a handful of players. The president had held that “artificial intelligence must be a servant, not a master”.

A few months earlier, following the G7, the president had advocated better regulation of AI, openly expressing concern about “non-cooperation between democracies”. On the sidelines of the summit, he had also brought together OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind to discuss the rise of artificial intelligence and the inherent dangers of this technology, which is disrupting every layer of society.

A context of abuses

This surprise defense advisory comes at a time when AI-related abuses are multiplying. This summer, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini models repeatedly broke out of their digital jail to launch cyberattacks autonomously. Some of the attacks resulted in several companies being hacked, including the open-source platform Hugging Face.

In parallel, several voices in the industry spoke up to call for a slowdown in AI research and development. This is the case of OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. The call for a slowdown sparked controversy in Silicon Valley. Several entrepreneurs pushed back against calls from AI royalty, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. The controversy even reached the Oval Office. Donald Trump made clear that easing off on AI development was completely out of the question, for fear of falling behind China.

AI has also been linked to numerous controversies in France. Last month, Canadian-Haitian writer Thélyson Orélien was accused of using artificial intelligence to write his latest novel, “It Was That or Die.” He had received several prestigious literary awards before the scandal broke out and a detector identified AI stylistic tics in his prose.Although he firmly denies having entrusted his writings to a machine, the writer was excluded from the Prix Goncourt.

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