There is a particular kind of political pressure that well-funded industry lobbying produces — a pressure to soften language, delay legislation, accept voluntary commitments in place of enforceable standards and treat child safety as a problem the industry is working on rather than one that governments must solve. Emmanuel Macron, at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, refused that pressure publicly and explicitly. Children’s safety, he said, is not up for debate.
His evidence was the most compelling available. Research by Unicef and Interpol found that 1.2 million children in 11 countries had been victimised by AI-generated explicit deepfakes in a single year — one in 25 children in the worst-affected nations. The Grok chatbot scandal had demonstrated in public what researchers had been documenting in reports: that AI tools are being deployed against children at scale, and that the platforms and developers responsible have not prevented it. Macron’s argument is that they will not, unless they are legally required to.
France’s domestic policy on this issue is concrete and progressing. A ban on social media access for under-15s is moving through the legislative process, backed by governmental conviction that the evidence of harm justifies intervention. Through the G7 presidency, Macron is pushing to internationalise this commitment — not as a French model to be exported wholesale, but as a starting point for the kind of coordinated international action that a global technology problem requires.
The opposition from the Trump administration was vocal. The White House’s AI adviser used the Delhi summit to attack the EU’s AI Act as hostile to innovation — a line that has been consistent from the administration since its earliest days. Macron’s response was equally consistent: Europe innovates and regulates simultaneously, and the evidence for this is readily available. He described the critics as misinformed rather than hostile, leaving room for engagement while refusing to retreat.
António Guterres gave Macron significant multilateral support, framing child safety within a broader argument about the dangers of unaccountable AI development. Narendra Modi aligned on child-safe technology and open-source development. Even parts of the tech industry, represented by Sam Altman’s call for international oversight, acknowledged that the current model is insufficient. Macron’s refusal to bow to big tech pressure was not mere rhetoric. It was backed by policy, evidence and a growing international coalition.