A range of world leaders and representatives from top technology firms are gathered in Paris for the high-stakes “AI Action Summit” on the promises and perils of artificial intelligence. The U.S. and China have sent high-powered delegations as the technology rivals look to build support for their competing visions of a future where they each control critical technology.

The AI Action Summit website clearly states that its participants understand that no “single governance initiative” will oversee AI worldwide. The Trump administration’s view of AI standards and rules will become more apparent at the summit, which Vice President J.D. Vance is attending.

The summit comes amid international controversy over the sudden rise in the popularity of China’s AI app DeepSeek, which sent shock waves through markets worldwide last month when it advertised a model that claimed to be on par with that of U.S. market leader OpenAI and had been developed for a tiny fraction of the cost. Mr. Trump’s Commerce Secretary-nominee Howard Lutnick has accused DeepSeek of stealing American intellectual property to fashion its AI app, and OpenAI is among those reportedly investigating the potential thievery.

Serbian Foreign Minister Marko Duric tells Threat Status that his country — a landlocked Balkan nation at the crossroads of Southeast and Central Europe — will emerge from its white-hot political crisis and become a strategically vital “bridge” between the U.S. and its top global adversaries, China and Russia.

Mr. Duric said in an exclusive interview that the administration of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic is prepared for an “internal dialogue” with its political opponents amid escalating nationwide protests over alleged government corruption and substandard infrastructure projects. Prime Minister Milos Vucevic resigned last month amid those protests.

The U.S. has deep concerns about China’s economic investments in Serbia as part of Beijing’s global Belt and Road infrastructure initiative. Mr. Duric defended China’s investments in his country. He also rejected the notion that close economic ties with Beijing — or even the threat of “debt traps” that many analysts say China could wield as geopolitical leverage — would undermine Serbia’s relationship with the United States.

Is the DOGE a threat to U.S. national security, or will it help revolutionize the bureaucracy-heavy defense acquisition process in positive ways? Those questions are at the center of the latest episode of the Threat Status Weekly Podcast. 

Retired U.S. Navy Capt. Gene Moran, an author and longtime adviser to private defense firms trying to navigate the Pentagon’s byzantine acquisition and contract-approval processes, joins the podcast to discuss the mindset U.S. officials may need to embrace to sharpen America’s competitive edge in the defense industrial production space against great-power adversaries such as China.

Mr. Musk “is successful in his business because he takes much more risk. I’m not saying that the government is ready to take the kinds of risk that SpaceX or Tesla, for example, might take, but we are erring way too far in the direction of being 100% certain of something before we proceed,” says Mr. Moran. “We need to accept some of the risk that comes with moving faster and just have fewer people in the approval process.”

The immediate reaction by pundits to Mr. Trump’s out-of-the-box proposals regarding moving the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip to other countries has been “knee-jerk rejection,” according to Alan Dershowitz and Andrew Stein, who write that “few, however, have proposed better alternatives.”

Mr. Dershowitz is a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, and Mr. Stein, a Democrat, served as the New York City Council president from 1986 to 1994.

“Certainly, a return to the status quo would be untenable,” they write. “It would result in more terrorism, more destruction, more deaths and less peace. We need the kind of new thinking that occurred after the defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan at the end of World War II.”

“Wars result in population movements, especially for residents of nations that initiated the wars,” Mr. Dershowitz and Mr. Stein write, adding that “peace is more important than place, and if an enduring peace in the Middle East could be achieved with temporary or even longer-term population transfers, it may be worth considering.”

The Chinese Communist Party, essentially a criminal organization, invests “an entire supply chain into shipping opioid chemicals to the notorious Mexican drug cartels, helping them make and smuggle fentanyl across the border” into the United States,” writes Washington Times opinion columnist Rowan Scarborough.

“Then a shameless China denies it,” he writes, noting that “on Feb. 1, President Trump called their bluff by imposing new tariffs to stop the flow.”

“China is inflicting as much pain and turmoil on America as possible without crossing the line into outright war. It hacks and steals from us, embeds malware into our electric and water infrastructure, sets up fake police stations, buys American farmland, spies everywhere, takes over the Panama Canal and spreads social media spyware,” Mr. Scarborough writes. “But with fentanyl, China’s game is to kill us. Nearly 80,000 or so in the United States die each year via overdose.”

• Feb. 10-11 — Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, the French government

• Feb. 11 — China’s Power: Up for Debate 2025, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• Feb. 11 —  Hearing: China’s Strategic Port Investments in the Western Hemisphere and the Implications for U.S. Homeland Security, House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Transportation and Maritime Security

• Feb. 13 — The Future of the Panama Canal, Wilson Center

• Feb. 14-16 — Munich Security Conference, MSC 2025

• Feb. 17-21 — International Defense Exhibition and Conference (IDEX) 2025, United Arab Emirates