The AI Impact Summit in Delhi became an unexpected flashpoint for one of the defining debates of our era: who gets to set the rules for artificial intelligence, and who pays the price when there are none. French President Emmanuel Macron arrived with a clear agenda — defending European regulation and demanding stronger protections for children in the digital world. What unfolded was a remarkable collision of political will, tech ambition and genuine moral urgency.
Macron’s sharpest words were reserved for those who conflate regulation with obstruction. The Trump administration’s White House AI adviser had openly criticised the EU’s AI Act earlier in the day, calling it unhelpful to innovators. Macron, visibly unmoved, replied that Europe’s critics were “misinformed friends” and that safety and innovation are not opposites. His framing recast the entire debate: regulation, in his telling, is not a ceiling on ambition but a foundation for trust.
The urgency of that framing became clearer with every statistic shared at the summit. Research by Unicef and Interpol documented 1.2 million children whose images had been turned into sexually explicit deepfakes in a single year. One in 25 children in some countries has been targeted — numbers that cut through the usual abstractions of tech policy and land with the weight of a real crisis. Macron was explicit: what is forbidden in physical spaces must also be forbidden online.
António Guterres used his platform to challenge the concentration of AI power, warning that the technology’s future cannot be dictated by a few wealthy nations or a handful of tech billionaires. India’s Narendra Modi made a similar point, advocating for open-source AI development so that smaller and developing nations can participate in and benefit from the AI revolution, rather than merely consuming what powerful nations produce.
Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Sam Altman of OpenAI were both present, though they notably declined to join hands in Modi’s attempted display of tech unity — a small but symbolically rich moment at a summit full of competing visions. The Delhi gathering ended not with consensus but with something perhaps more useful: a frank acknowledgment that the stakes are enormous and the clock is ticking.
Macron Confronts the Tech Giants: A G7 Battle Over Children, AI and the Future of the Internet
