Emmanuel Macron has hit back at US criticism of Europe’s efforts to regulate AI, vowing to protect children from “digital abuse” during France’s presidency of the G7.
Speaking at the AI Impact summit in Delhi, the French president 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 António Guterres, the UN secretary general, who told delegates – including several US tech billionaires – that “no child should be a test subject for unregulated AI”.
“The future of AI cannot be decided by a few countries or left to the whims of a few billionaires,” Guterres said. “AI must belong to everyone”.
Bill Gates had been scheduled to speak but withdrew at the last minute amid renewed scrutiny of his past links to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Meanwhile, an attempt by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, to stage a show of unity among leading tech billionaires went awry when the rival heads of OpenAI and Anthropic awkwardly 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. Amodei split from OpenAI in 2021 over differences over how to manage safety risks.
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. He told delegates he would continue to “rant” against legislation that was not “conducive to an entrepreneur who wants to build innovative technology”.
But Macron told the intergovernmental 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.”
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. In some countries, one in 25 children – the equivalent of one child in every classroom – had been affected.
“There is no reason our children should be exposed online to what is legally forbidden in the real world,” Macron said. “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.”
Among the tech executives attending was Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, which is facing a legal challenge from the family of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who took his own life after discussing suicide with ChatGPT.
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 also 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, the co-chief executive of Anthropic, 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”.
Modi said it was “imperative that AI is child safe and family-guided”, likening the emergence of AI to the discovery of fire and calling it a “profound transformation in human history”.
India is seeking to position itself as the world’s third AI power behind the US and China, with Google this week announcing a $15bn investment in datacentres and subsea cables linking India to the US and other countries.
Modi said there must be “established levels of authenticity for content within the digital world … people must know what is authentic, and what has been generated by AI”.
The interventions come amid growing public concern about the societal risks of AI, as the most advanced models remain largely controlled by about four US companies and a handful of Chinese rivals.
Modi set out an alternative vision, leveraging India’s 1.4 billion population as a huge growth market for tech firms. He said: “We must prevent an AI monopoly. Many nations consider AI to be a strategic asset, and therefore it is developed confidentially and its availability is carefully managed.
“However, our nation India holds a different perspective. We believe that technology, like a I will only truly benefit the world when it is shared and when open source code becomes available.”
His comments appeared to be directed at the US, where leading AI models are not open-source and cannot be used or adapted without permission. By contrast, China’s leading systems, such as DeepSeek and Qwen, are broadly open-source.
