It should not “be the Wild West”… Macron wants to protect children from AI

The effects of new technologies on young people continue to worry the tenant of the Élysée. Emmanuel Macron thus estimated on Monday that it was necessary to “ban” artificial intelligence where it presents a “risk” for children, their “mental health, their brain”, just as it is necessary to monitor its impact on “democratic and national security”.

“If there is a risk for children with certain uses of AI, then it must be banned,” declared the president, on the eve of the adoption of a charter on the subject at the Paris Peace Forum, in an interview with the daily Les Echos posted online Monday evening.

As for social networks, Macron advocates regulation

“Just because it’s AI doesn’t mean it has to be the Wild West. This system is not tenable, it must be changed to the point of banning it if it is bad,” adds the head of state, who is also fighting for the banning of certain social networks for under 15s. A committee of experts must submit recommendations this Tuesday on protection against AI, a field less explored at this stage than that of the impact of social networks.

In the process, research laboratories will commit, within a “charter”, to a certain number of measures such as independent evaluations of the generative AI systems placed on the market as well as access to the data from their models. This charter, which is “intended to shed light on national and European legislative debates”, will notably bring together the American giants OpenAI and Anthropic, said the Élysée.

Companies will accept “the principle of a pre-audit and pre-certification with a prior study of the models before putting them in the hands of children”, explains the Head of State. “We are going to bring European regulation and push for Americans, Canadians, and others to do like us. We are creating the beginnings of border AI regulation,” he adds.

A start of international awareness

Emmanuel Macron also brought together around fifty heads of state and government, representatives of international organizations, companies, researchers and laboratories on the “risks” of AI for collective security. The participants committed to “three priorities”, “better assess the risks of the most advanced models independently and publicly, better share alerts in the event of a serious incident and make those who develop models responsible”, he detailed on X.

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British Prime Ministers Andy Burnham, Canadian Mark Carney, Norwegian Jonas Gahr Støre, Dutch Rob Jetten and Japanese Sanae Takaichi participated in the video as well as Finnish President Alexander Stubb, US Secretary of State for the Treasury Scott Bessent and the CEOs of OpenAI, Sam Altman, Anthropic Dario Amodei, Mistral Arthur Mensch and Microsoft President Brad Smith.