There are summits that document the world as it is and summits that begin the world as it might be. The AI Impact Summit in Delhi, partly through Emmanuel Macron’s intervention, had elements of both. The French president did not change everything. But he changed the terms of the conversation — establishing child safety not as a sidebar to AI governance but as its most urgent and morally unambiguous test case.
The facts Macron brought to the summit were newly published and deeply alarming. 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 some nations. The Grok chatbot had been used to produce tens of thousands of sexualised images of children. Macron cited these facts not as background information but as the centre of his argument: this is the human cost of regulatory failure, and it is happening now.
His proposals were concrete. France is pursuing legislation to ban social media for under-15s. The G7 presidency will push for internationally coordinated child safety standards. Platforms and AI developers will be called on to accept legal accountability for the content their systems produce or enable. Macron’s language was careful but his intention was clear: he wants enforceable rules, not aspirational guidelines.
The political ecosystem of the summit responded in ways that would have seemed unlikely even a year ago. António Guterres called for AI to be treated as a global commons. Narendra Modi called for child-safe, open-source AI. Sam Altman called for an international oversight body. The convergence — however tentative and however qualified — represents a shift in the consensus about what AI governance requires. Macron’s framing of child safety as the test case helped produce that shift.
The conversation Macron changed in Delhi will continue in G7 meetings, in national legislatures, in technology companies and in courts. It will be contested, imperfect and slow. But the starting point has moved. Child safety in the AI era is now a headline rather than a footnote. That shift — from footnote to headline — is the kind of change that political leadership can actually achieve. In Delhi, Macron achieved it.
