When Emmanuel Macron took the stage at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, he did not arrive as a supplicant seeking American approval for European regulation. He arrived as a leader with a model, a mandate and a moral case. The French president’s message was unambiguous: Europe’s approach to artificial intelligence — innovative, invested and safe — is not a regional quirk but a global template worth adopting. The world, he suggested, should be paying attention.
The statistics that underpinned his argument were drawn from fresh Unicef and Interpol research, published just before the summit. Across 11 countries, 1.2 million children had been victimised by AI-generated sexually explicit deepfakes in a single year. In some nations, that is one child in every classroom. These numbers did not represent a theoretical future harm. They represented a present, ongoing crisis enabled by technology that is legal, widely distributed and advancing faster than the institutions meant to govern it.
Macron’s response was two-pronged. Domestically, France is pursuing legislation to ban social media access for children under 15 — a policy that reflects a clear governmental judgment that the harms of unregulated platforms outweigh the costs of intervention. Internationally, through France’s G7 presidency, Macron is building a coalition around enforceable standards for child safety that would require platforms and AI developers to take genuine legal responsibility rather than publish aspirational safety guidelines.
The American critique of European regulation — delivered at the same summit by the Trump administration’s AI adviser — was that it harms entrepreneurs and stifles innovation. Macron dismissed this as the view of “misinformed friends,” pointing to Europe’s continued record of investment and technological development as evidence that the premise is false. His counter-framing was elegant: safe environments are not the enemy of innovation; they are its precondition. Trust, in markets as in relationships, is what makes durable systems possible.
António Guterres and Narendra Modi gave Macron valuable international reinforcement, the former warning against AI monopolies and the latter calling for open-source, child-safe technology development. Sam Altman’s call for an international AI oversight body suggested that even within the industry, the argument for governance is gaining ground. Macron left Delhi having strengthened his case, broadened his coalition and placed child safety firmly on the international agenda. The world was watching. Now the work begins.
Macron Storms Delhi Summit: Europe’s AI Safety Model Is the World’s Best Hope
