French President Emmanuel Macron has hit back at US criticism of Europe’s efforts to regulate artificial intelligence, vowing to protect children from “digital abuse” during France’s presidency of the G7. Speaking at the AI Impact summit in Delhi, Macron called for tougher safeguards after global outrage over Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot being used to generate tens of thousands of sexualised images of children, and amid mounting concern about the concentration of AI power in a handful of companies.
His remarks were echoed by UN Secretary General António Guterres, who told delegates that “no child should be a test subject for unregulated AI”. Guterres added: “The future of AI cannot be decided by a few countries or left to the whims of a few billionaires. AI must belong to everyone.” Research published this month by Unicef and Interpol across 11 countries found at least 1.2 million children reported having their images manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes in the past year.
Macron said: “There is no reason our children should be exposed online to what is legally forbidden in the real world. Our platforms, governments and regulators should be working together to make the internet and social media a safe space. This is why, in France, we are embarking on a process to ban social networks for children under 15 years old.”
Meanwhile, an attempt by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to stage a show of unity among leading tech billionaires went awry when the rival heads of OpenAI and Anthropic declined to hold hands on stage. Modi stood at the centre of a line of 13 tech executives, including leaders from Google, Meta and Microsoft, who all raised clasped hands – apart from Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. Modi said it was “imperative that AI is child safe and family-guided”, likening the emergence of AI to the discovery of fire.
On Wednesday, the White House’s senior AI adviser, Sriram Krishnan, renewed the Trump administration’s criticism of AI regulation, singling out the EU’s AI Act. But Macron told the summit: “Opposite to what some misinformed friends have been saying, Europe is not blindly focused on regulation. Europe is a space for innovation and investment, but it is a safe space, and safe spaces win in the long run.”
Sam Altman told delegates the rapid pace of AI development meant “by the end of 2028, more of the world’s intellectual capacity could reside inside of datacentres than outside of them”. He stressed the urgent need for “regulation or safeguards” and called for the creation of a body akin to the International Atomic Energy Agency to oversee the international coordination of AI. Dario Amodei said he was “concerned about the autonomous behaviour of AI models, their potential for misuse by individuals and governments and their potential for economic displacement”.
