French President Emmanuel Macron used the global stage of the AI Impact Summit in Delhi to make an argument that is simple on its surface but radical in practice: the welfare of children must take precedence over the commercial interests of technology companies. In a room packed with tech executives and world leaders, his words landed with the force of a challenge rather than a suggestion.
The evidence supporting his position is hard to ignore. A joint Unicef-Interpol study released this month found that in just one year, 1.2 million children across 11 countries had been victimised by AI-generated explicit deepfakes. In the worst-affected countries, one in every 25 children had experienced this form of abuse. Macron pointed directly to incidents like Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot being used to generate tens of thousands of sexualised images of children as proof that voluntary industry restraint is not enough.
Macron’s policy response is concrete. France is already pursuing legislation to ban children under 15 from social media, and he intends to put child safety at the centre of France’s G7 presidency agenda. He argued passionately that governments and platforms must collaborate to make social media and the internet genuinely safe spaces, not just theoretically regulated ones. The distinction matters: theory without enforcement has done little to protect children so far.
The summit also surfaced broader anxieties about who controls AI. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for inclusive global governance, warning that decisions about the world’s most powerful technology cannot be left to a few countries or a few billionaires. India’s Prime Minister Modi made the case for open-source AI, positioning India as a third way between the closed American model and China’s state-directed approach.
Sam Altman of OpenAI acknowledged the need for regulation, even calling for an international oversight body modelled on the International Atomic Energy Agency. Dario Amodei of Anthropic voiced concerns about autonomous AI behaviour and its potential for misuse by both individuals and governments. The summit made it abundantly clear that the tech industry’s self-image as a force for good is increasingly difficult to maintain without serious accountability mechanisms — exactly the kind Macron is determined to build.