Red lines in international politics are rarely drawn clearly. Emmanuel Macron drew one in Delhi, at the AI Impact Summit, and he drew it plainly enough that everyone in the room could see it. No technology, however powerful, however economically promising, however strategically important, is worth the cost of children’s safety. This is not a negotiating position. It is a moral limit, and Macron intends to enforce it through France’s G7 presidency.
The evidence motivating that limit is stark. 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 the worst-affected nations. The Grok chatbot, owned by one of the world’s wealthiest individuals, had been used to produce tens of thousands of sexualised images of children. The technology enabling these crimes is legal. The perpetrators often face no legal consequence. And the scale is growing.
Macron’s response combines the urgency of the problem with the tools of democratic governance. France is pursuing legislation to ban social media for under-15s — a measure that signals both the seriousness of the problem and the government’s willingness to act. The G7 presidency provides the platform to push for international standards, and Macron has used the Delhi summit to signal his intention to do exactly that, calling for platforms and regulators to collaborate under enforceable frameworks.
His defence of European regulation against the Trump administration’s critique was equally grounded in principle. The EU’s AI Act is not, Macron argued, an obstacle to innovation — it is a condition for sustainable innovation. Safe environments attract investment and trust. Regulatory frameworks that protect people create markets that work for everyone, not just those wealthy enough to protect themselves from the worst outcomes. The American framing of regulation as the enemy of progress, he suggested, misunderstands what progress is for.
António Guterres and Narendra Modi reinforced Macron’s red line from their respective positions — Guterres from the perspective of global governance and equity, Modi from the perspective of a country with the world’s largest child population and a stake in ensuring that AI development does not replicate existing inequalities. The red line Macron drew in Delhi is not yet a wall. But it is a beginning, and beginnings matter.