Emmanuel Macron is not content to speak about the dangers of unregulated AI. He has a plan, a platform and a presidency — and he is using all three. France’s turn at the helm of the G7 has given Macron an extraordinary opportunity to push child safety in the digital world from a recurring talking point into a priority for coordinated international action. The AI Impact Summit in Delhi was where he made his intentions clear.
The statistics that framed his speech are alarming by any measure. Research by Unicef and Interpol found that 1.2 million children across 11 countries had been victimised by AI-generated sexually explicit deepfakes in a single year. In some countries, one child in 25 had been affected — numbers that make child safety not a marginal concern but a mainstream crisis. Macron argued that this crisis requires a mainstream response: governments, platforms and regulators working together under enforceable international standards.
His domestic policy already reflects this commitment. France is pursuing legislation to ban social media access for children under the age of 15, a measure that has provoked debate but also demonstrated seriousness of purpose. Macron is not simply calling on other countries to do what France has not done — he is leading by example, using domestic policy as a template for what international coordination might achieve. The G7 presidency gives him the convening power to make that template exportable.
The summit also gave Macron a chance to respond to ongoing American criticism of European AI regulation. The Trump administration’s AI adviser had renewed his attack on the EU’s AI Act earlier in the summit, describing it as hostile to entrepreneurs. Macron’s reply was patient but pointed: Europe innovates, invests and protects its people, and there is no reason to treat these as competing priorities. His confidence was striking — not the confidence of someone on the defensive, but of someone who believes the evidence is on his side.
António Guterres gave Macron strong international support, warning that AI power concentrated in a few hands is dangerous for democracy and development. Narendra Modi’s call for open-source AI and child-safe technology aligned closely with Macron’s child safety agenda. The political momentum from Delhi is real, and Macron’s G7 presidency will determine whether it produces concrete results. The children who need protection are not waiting for the next summit.