Exclusive | Macron says he and PM Modi will push for tech sovereignty at AI Summit in Paris

Ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Paris, France’s President Emmanuel Macron said that both leaders want to push for tech sovereignty. The two leaders are scheduled to attend the AI Summit in Paris this week. In an exclusive conversation with Firstpost and France TV, Macron emphasised that pushing for tech sovereignty on a global stage will be his and PM Modi’s main agenda at the summit.

“I think with Prime Minister Modi we firmly believe that India and France are two great powers and we have a special relationship in respect to this. We respect and want to work with the United States, and we want to work with China but don’t want to depend on no one,” the French leader said.

He went on to highlight how India and France have a strong bilateral partnership in the defence sector with “our navies and fighter planes”. Macron lauded the fact that India is a “training superpower,” and produces 1 million engineers a year, which is “more than Europe and the US combined.”

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“It’s a very deep-seated conviction that we want to be independent, that doesn’t mean we want to be isolated but we want to have technologies and partners that we can trust without dependencies,” he furthered.

Macron on AI race and tech sovereignty

When asked how both France and India pushed for strategic autonomy over the years and whether they want to replicate it in regard to tech sovereignty, Macron gave an affirmative response. “India and France are leading. So we have the US and China far ahead. And then you have France, the UK, India, the UAE, and then Germany and the others. So we want to work together on AI. Prime Minister Modi is facing the same issue that all Americans and there are a few Chinese players in that space and he wants to benefit from the innovation, but he wants it to also be happening in India,” Macron told Firstpost and France TV.

“Sometimes if there’s non-cooperation with these players then you will have to take things on your own,” he added, highlighting how during the COVID-19 pandemic all the nations started looking inward. “If you depend on others to produce medicine and technology then things can go wrong, so we need that partnership because we have shared interest and we have the same worldview focused friendship and interest,” he explained.

“Together we will develop technological sovereignty, we want to train our talent so that they can go abroad but they should also be at home and we can create data centres in India and France with sustainable energy and we want our own language model in France and India. We don’t want to depend on the US and the Chinese models and we want applications in all fields,” Macron furthered.

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‘Third way forward’

Macron also spoke about how India and France can manage to carve a third way forward in the tech race which has majorly been all about the United States and China.

“I believe very strongly that that is the future. That is why in 2018 I started this Indo-Pacific strategy. I’m obsessed with one thing and that is that I want our children to lead better lives than we do, and I want them to have a say in their future that is independence, that is progress for France and for Europe,” Macron said.

“We need to fight today when it comes to our technology, to when it comes to our defence, all of these issues, we need to make sure we depend on no one,” he concluded.