The China Mail - Sovereignty fears to dog AI enthusiasm at France's Vivatech

Organisers have recruited Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos as Wednesday's star guest, with French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian leader Narendra Modi expected Thursday.

Also joining the roughly 15,000 start-ups showing off their inventions until Saturday will be French researcher Yann LeCun, who made waves this year with a new company focused on physical AI after leaving Facebook's parent company Meta.

Meanwhile debate around Europe's tech sovereignty was stoked on the eve of the event by French Prime Minister Sebastian Lecornu.

He announced that the country's domestic intelligence agency would break with the American data sifting giant Palantir in favour of local firm ChapsVision.

Washington had already pushed tech dependency to the top of the agenda last week.

It banned non-American users from the powerful AI models Fable and Mythos, whose creator Anthropic withdrew access for all users in response.

- European sovereignty -

With 200 German start-ups in Paris as this year's guest nation, organisers want to make the 10th year of Vivatech a celebration of European cross-border cooperation.

"In a time of growing technological and global fragmentation, this spotlight underscores Europe's ambition to affirm its sovereignty and take the lead in innovation," they said.

ASML, the Dutch firm that makes ultraviolet lithography machines indispensable to advanced chipmaking, is sending its chief executive Christophe Fouquet to Paris.

The company's commanding place in the global semiconductor value chain has recently propelled it to Europe's biggest company by market value.

- Dancing robots -

Bringing together founders, investors, industry associations and national delegations, Vivatech is a hive of activity every year.

Organisers have expanded the 2026 event to 70,000 square metres (750,000 square feet) from its usual 50,000, and visitor numbers could top last year's record of 180,000.

This year tech firms were able to offer demos of their wares for the first time on Paris' Champs-Elysees avenue.

Spectacular robotics displays are scheduled for one of the main stages on Wednesday.

Chinese firms Unitree and AgiBot aim to again wow spectators with their dextrous humanoid robots, while European start-ups including Genesis and PAL Robotics will also be on show.

Fans of AI automation may be more excited by the Thursday appearance of Peter Steinberger, the Austrian creator of the open-source AI agent OpenClaw that took Silicon Valley by storm earlier this year.

F.Brown--ThChM