Macron Says AI Should Be Banned Wherever It Endangers Children's Mental Health

"If there is a risk for children with certain uses of AI, then it must be banned," Macron said in an interview with the French daily Les Echos. "Just because it's AI doesn't mean it should be the Wild West." He said AI should be banned where it "threatened" children's "mental health or their brain."

The charter would put leading US labs on record accepting outside scrutiny of their models before minors use them, and France wants to carry that approach into European law and urge other governments to follow. Macron said companies would accept "the principle of a pre-audit and pre-certification, with a prior review of the models before putting them in children's hands." His office said the text is "intended to inform national and European legislative debates."

Under the charter, research labs will commit to independent evaluations of generative AI systems placed on the market and to giving access to their models' data, Macron's office said. The French outlet L'Info Durable reported that the commitments also cover evaluation methods and financial support for independent researchers. Macron's office named OpenAI and Anthropic among the participants but did not identify the other signatories.

"We are going to advance European regulation and push for the Americans, the Canadians, and others to do as we do. We are in the process of creating the beginnings of frontier AI regulation," Macron said. He said the framework should take account of three categories of danger: children, democratic security and major national security issues.

The effort builds on the Coalition for Children's Rights and Protection in the Age of AI, which France, Spain and Kenya launched in July and Australia later joined. The coalition presented a roadmap in New York in September, during the UN General Assembly. In it, the coalition said AI systems that claim to benefit children should eventually need prior authorisation before reaching the market. Until then, it said, developers should open their models and data to independent researchers and make voluntary commitments. It said it would present the first of those commitments at the Paris Peace Forum.

Macron is separately pushing to bar under-15s from some social networks. On Monday he also held a videoconference with around 50 heads of state and government, international organisations, companies, researchers and laboratories to discuss the risks AI poses to collective security. The prime ministers of Britain, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands and Japan took part, along with the chief executives of OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and Microsoft. "The diagnosis is shared. We must act together," Macron wrote on X afterwards.

The next steps come on Tuesday. In the morning, a committee of experts is due to give Macron recommendations on protecting children from AI, covering mental health, cognitive development, education and the risk of dependency. According to L'Info Durable, its members include psychiatry professor Amine Benyamina, CNRS research director Serena Villata and cognitive neuroscience specialist Raphaël Gaillard. In the afternoon, a summit on children at the forum is set to adopt a declaration called "Les enfants d'abord" ("Children first"). It sets out policies that companies, philanthropies, states and international organisations are prepared to support.