Some political visions are vague enough to mean everything and nothing. Emmanuel Macron’s vision for AI governance, as articulated at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, is not one of them. It is specific, evidenced and policy-grounded: a world in which the laws that protect children in the physical world also apply online, enforced by governments rather than left to the commercial judgement of platform companies. The vision is clear. The question is whether the political will exists to make it real.
The evidence that motivates Macron’s urgency is damning. Research by Unicef and Interpol found that 1.2 million children in 11 countries had been victims of AI-generated sexually explicit deepfakes in a single year. In some of the countries studied, one in 25 children had been targeted — the equivalent of one child per classroom. These are not projections or probabilities. They are documented harms, produced by legal technology, enabled by regulatory gaps that governments have so far failed to close.
Macron’s response is comprehensive. France is already pursuing legislation to ban social media access for children under 15. His G7 presidency will push for international coordination on enforceable child safety standards. He has called on platforms and regulators to stop treating each other as adversaries and start working as partners toward a shared goal: a digital environment that is safe enough for children to use without fear. This is not an impossible standard — it is the standard that applies to every other environment where children spend time.
The American critique of this vision — that regulation harms innovation and competitiveness — was delivered at Delhi by the Trump administration’s AI adviser and addressed by Macron with polite but firm rebuttal. Europe innovates, he said. Europe invests. The AI Act does not prevent either. What it does do is ensure that both happen within a framework of accountability — and that, the French president argued, is not a weakness but a foundation for sustainable progress.
António Guterres, Narendra Modi and voices within the tech industry itself all gave Macron reinforcement at Delhi. The coalition for meaningful child safety standards in AI is broader than its critics would like to admit, and it is growing. Macron’s G7 presidency is the clearest opportunity yet to translate that coalition into policy. The children who need protection are not abstract — they are in classrooms, on platforms and in the statistics. They deserve a world with better answers than the one they currently inhabit.
