The journey from Paris to Delhi is long, but Emmanuel Macron’s message arrived intact and with considerable force. At the AI Impact Summit, the French president brought to an international audience a set of commitments that have been taking shape in French domestic policy for months — and placed them in the global context where they most need to be heard. The result was one of the summit’s defining moments, and potentially one of its most consequential.
Macron’s central argument was built on the most alarming statistics 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. In some countries, one in 25 children had been affected. The French president did not use these figures as background colour. He used them as the foundation of a moral argument: governments that know children are being harmed on this scale and fail to act are making a choice, not suffering an oversight.
France’s domestic response is already substantive. The country is pursuing legislation to ban social media access for children under 15 — an intervention that reflects a governmental conclusion that the harms of unregulated platforms are sufficiently documented to justify action. Macron did not present this as France’s gift to the world; he presented it as a starting point for international coordination, a demonstration that government action is possible and a template for what it might look like.
The international context that Macron brought to Delhi — including vigorous defence of the EU’s AI Act against American criticism and engagement with Guterres and Modi on global governance — gave his child safety agenda a political frame that made it more than a national policy preference. It situated France’s commitments within a broader argument about what democratic governments owe their citizens in the AI era and what the international community owes children specifically.
The Delhi summit brought together enough political weight and institutional authority to make meaningful change possible. Whether the momentum from Macron’s address translates into coordinated international action depends on what France’s G7 presidency produces. But the journey from Paris to Delhi has moved the agenda forward. Child safety is now at the centre of global AI talks. Keeping it there will require exactly the kind of sustained political commitment Macron has shown.