U.S. Vice President JD Vance is bound for Europe next week on his first foreign trip since the inauguration.
The Hill sets out Vance will travel to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit in France and the Munich Security Conference in Germany, citing the Washington Post as a source.
The announcement came after U.S. President Donald Trump hinted the European Union (EU) could be next to face tariffs, after he slapped 25 percent levies on goods from Mexico and Canada along with an additional 10 percent tax on imports from China.
While arriving in Maryland from Florida, Trump said tariffs on E.U. goods imported into the U.S. could happen “pretty soon”.
“They don’t take our cars, they don’t take our farm products, they take almost nothing and we take everything from them. Millions of cars, tremendous amounts of food and farm products,” he told journalists.
The AI Action Summit will take place in the French capital’s sumptuous Grand Palais, built for the 1900 Universal Exhibition.
China’s Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will join Vance to be the highest-profile representatives from 80 countries to mingle with players from across the sector on February 10 and 11.
The report notes Vance’s participation comes as competition between the U.S. and China has heated up over AI development amid the surge of Chinese AI startup chatbot DeepSeek last week.
Attendees at the summit will include Sam Altman, head of OpenAI — the firm that brought generative models to public consciousness in 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT.
Google boss Sundar Pichai and Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis, who leads the company’s DeepMind AI research unit, will also be there, alongside Arthur Mensch, founder of French AI developer Mistral, AFP reports.
Vance will then travel to Germany for the Munich Security Conference, which takes place from February 14 to 16 and focuses on global security challenges, including on issues like democracy and climate security.
The international foray comes after Vance visited the people of East Palestine, Ohio, on Monday to assure them they are not forgotten, as Breitbart News reported.
Vance Visits East Palestine on The Two-Year-Anniversary of Disaster: You Are Not Forgotten
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg did not visit the area until after Trump and — to no surprise — blamed the incident on Trump.
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