Emmanuel Macron arrived at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi carrying three things: a defence of European AI regulation, a demand for stronger child safety standards and the conviction that these two positions are not in tension but mutually reinforcing. The French president’s speech was a careful argument for a vision of AI development that is ambitious about what technology can achieve and uncompromising about the conditions under which it must operate.
The defence of European regulation was vigorous. The Trump administration’s AI adviser had used the summit as a platform to attack the EU’s AI Act, suggesting it was hostile to entrepreneurs and innovation. Macron’s reply was characteristically direct: the critics are misinformed, and Europe’s record of investment and development in AI disproves their argument. He went further, suggesting that safe environments for innovation are more sustainable than unregulated ones — that the absence of legal frameworks does not produce freedom but instability.
The demand for child safety was equally concrete. Research by Unicef and Interpol had found that 1.2 million children across 11 countries had been victimised by AI-generated explicit deepfakes in a single year, with one in 25 children affected in some nations. Macron named the problem, cited the evidence and connected it directly to the regulatory debate: this is what unregulated AI looks like in human terms. This is who pays the price when governance fails.
France’s domestic policy gives weight to Macron’s international ambitions. The country is pursuing legislation to ban social media for under-15s, a measure that signals governmental seriousness and provides a model for international discussion. Through the G7 presidency, Macron intends to push for enforceable international standards — not aspirational statements but legal frameworks with real consequences for platforms and AI developers who fail to protect children.
The convergence at Delhi between Macron, António Guterres and Narendra Modi on the question of child safety was significant. Each came from a different political tradition and represented different national interests, yet their alignment on the need for child-safe, accountable AI development was genuine. That alignment is the foundation on which Macron’s international agenda rests, and the Delhi summit has made it stronger.