Macron’s Message to Modi: Child Safety Must Anchor India’s AI Ambitions

India’s Narendra Modi arrived at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi with a vision of his country as the world’s third AI superpower, a bridge between the United States and China and a champion of open, democratically accessible technology. Emmanuel Macron arrived with a narrower but equally important agenda: ensuring that child safety is non-negotiable in any AI development model, including India’s. The intersection of their two visions produced one of the summit’s most interesting moments.
Modi’s aspirations are genuine and large. He called for India’s 1.4 billion population to be treated as a market and a constituency for AI development, not merely a recipient of technology decided elsewhere. He advocated for open-source AI — a direct challenge to the closed-source models developed by leading American companies — and called for AI that is child-safe and family-guided. On the last point, at least, his language aligned closely with Macron’s more concrete proposals.
Macron’s contribution was to give that aspiration institutional substance. His call for platforms and governments to collaborate on enforceable standards, his domestic push to ban social media for under-15s and his use of the G7 presidency to advance child safety internationally all represent the kind of concrete policy action that transforms political statements into actual protection. Modi’s vision and Macron’s policy complement each other — the aspiration and the architecture.
The underlying data makes the urgency clear. Research by Unicef and Interpol found that 1.2 million children across 11 countries had been victimised by AI deepfakes in a single year. In some countries, one in every 25 children was affected. India, with the world’s largest child population, has a particular stake in ensuring that the AI future does not replicate and amplify the digital harms already documented elsewhere. Macron’s framework offers a starting point.
The Delhi summit brought together enough political and institutional power to generate real momentum on child safety in the AI era. Whether that momentum translates into coordinated action depends on the political choices made in the months ahead — through France’s G7 presidency, through India’s own digital governance framework and through the international institutions that António Guterres represents. The children who need protection do not have the luxury of waiting for the next summit.