At the Delhi AI Summit, Macron Made the Case That Europe’s Approach to AI Is the Right One

The narrative that Europe is the world’s chief obstacle to AI innovation took a significant hit in Delhi. French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking at the AI Impact Summit, made a confident and detailed case for the European approach to AI regulation — and did so in a room full of people who profit from less regulated environments. His argument was not defensive. It was a challenge to reconsider what success in AI actually looks like.
Macron’s central claim is that regulation and innovation are not opposites. Europe’s AI Act, maligned by American critics as red tape, is in his telling a foundation for trust — and trust, in markets as in relationships, is what makes durable systems possible. He pointed to Europe’s record of investment and innovation as evidence that the regulatory burden has not been crippling. What it has done, he suggested, is create conditions in which people can use technology without fearing that it will be turned against them.
The child safety case is his strongest illustration of this principle. AI-generated explicit deepfakes of children are being produced at extraordinary scale — over 1.2 million children victimised in one year, according to Unicef and Interpol research. This is happening in the absence of effective regulation, with technology that is legal, available and improving. Macron’s argument is not complicated: regulate it, or accept responsibility for the consequences.
He received support from unexpected quarters. Sam Altman of OpenAI, the epitome of American tech ambition, called for a new international body to oversee AI development — a position that would have seemed inconceivable from a Silicon Valley CEO just a few years ago. António Guterres went further, calling for AI to be treated as a global commons rather than private property. India’s Modi advocated for open-source models that could make AI genuinely universal. The Delhi consensus — to the extent one existed — was that the current model of AI development is unsustainable.
Macron left India having made his points clearly and having found more allies than opponents on the question of child safety. His G7 presidency gives him a meaningful platform to convert political alignment into policy action. The American administration may continue to argue that regulation is the enemy of innovation. But in Delhi, at least, the more compelling argument was the one Macron made: that innovation without accountability is not progress. It is just risk, transferred to the people who can least afford to bear it.