Macron’s Delhi Breakthrough: Child Safety and AI Governance Are Now Inseparable

Before the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, child safety and AI governance were often treated as related but distinct policy domains — the former a matter for child protection specialists and platform regulators, the latter a matter for competition economists and national security advisers. Emmanuel Macron changed this. Through the force of his argument and the specificity of his evidence, he established in Delhi that child safety is not an application of AI governance but its most fundamental test. The two cannot be separated.
The inseparability is most visible in the statistics Macron cited. 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. This crisis was not produced by bad actors misusing otherwise safe technology — it was produced by AI systems developed without adequate safety requirements, deployed on platforms without adequate accountability mechanisms and operating in a legal environment without adequate enforcement. It is, at every level, a governance failure.
Macron’s policy response treats it as such. France’s proposed ban on social media for under-15s is a governance intervention in a space that has previously been governed inadequately. His G7 presidency agenda will push for international standards that treat child safety as a core AI governance requirement rather than an optional extra. He called for platforms and governments to work together under enforceable frameworks — acknowledging that the governance failure is systemic rather than incidental, and requires systemic remedies.
His defence of European regulation was inseparable from his child safety argument. The EU’s AI Act’s requirements for transparency, accountability and safety assessments are, in Macron’s framing, the kinds of governance mechanisms that would make the documented harm to children less likely. The American critique of these requirements as hostile to innovation looks very different when placed alongside the documented consequences of their absence.
The breakthrough in Delhi is that this connection — between AI governance quality and child safety outcomes — is now part of the mainstream international debate. Guterres made it explicitly. Modi made it implicitly. Altman acknowledged it tentatively. Macron made it compellingly and repeatedly. Going forward, proposals for AI governance that do not address child safety will face the question of why not — a question that is difficult to answer without appearing indifferent to children’s welfare. That is Macron’s breakthrough, and it will outlast the summit.