It is not always clear, in the immediate aftermath of a political speech, whether what was said was important or merely impressive. Emmanuel Macron’s address at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi falls into the first category. The French president got the diagnosis right, the evidence right and the policy direction right — and he delivered all three with a clarity that should command attention from every government with a stake in AI’s future, which is to say every government.
The diagnosis: AI development without governance produces predictable and documented harm. The evidence: research by Unicef and Interpol showing that 1.2 million children in 11 countries were victimised by AI-generated explicit deepfakes in a single year. The policy direction: legislation, platform accountability, international coordination and a refusal to treat child safety as a cost to be balanced against commercial benefit. None of this is complicated. What has been missing is the political will to say it clearly and follow through.
Macron’s defence of European regulation deserves particular attention. The argument that the EU’s AI Act stifles innovation is widely repeated but poorly evidenced. Europe continues to attract AI investment and produce AI innovation. The Act’s requirements — transparency, accountability, safety assessments — are the kind of conditions that any responsible developer should be able to meet. Macron’s confidence in making this argument, in a room full of people with commercial interests in less regulation, was notable and appropriate.
The support Macron received from António Guterres and Narendra Modi suggests that his framing of the debate is finding resonance beyond Europe’s borders. Guterres’ warning about AI monopolies and Modi’s call for child-safe, open-source technology both point in the same direction as Macron’s agenda: toward a world where AI is governed in the public interest, not the interest of the handful of companies that currently dominate it.
The rest of the world should listen to Macron not because he is French or European or politically prominent, but because he is right. The evidence of harm to children is overwhelming. The tools of democratic governance are available. The political will is what has been missing, and in Delhi, Macron brought it. The question is whether others will follow.