Emmanuel Macron has articulated many doctrines during his presidency. In Delhi, at the AI Impact Summit, he added another: in the age of artificial intelligence, accountability must come before — or at the very least alongside — innovation. This is not an anti-technology position. It is a position about sequencing: about ensuring that the conditions for safe, trustworthy AI development are established rather than assumed. The child safety crisis, he argued, is what happens when assumption substitutes for governance.
The facts supporting that argument are drawn from the most recent and most disturbing research available. Unicef and Interpol found that 1.2 million children in 11 countries had been victimised by AI-generated sexually explicit deepfakes in a single year. In some countries, the rate is one child in 25. These are not the victims of a technology that is difficult to understand or govern. They are the victims of a regulatory environment that has allowed harmful applications of understood technology to proliferate without legal consequence.
France’s response begins at home. Legislation to ban social media access for under-15s signals that the French government is prepared to act where evidence of harm is sufficient — and on the impact of unregulated platforms on children, the evidence is now overwhelming. Through the G7 presidency, Macron is extending this logic internationally, pushing for coordinated standards that would give other governments the framework to take similar action and give enforcement agencies the authority to act against violations.
Macron’s Delhi doctrine also includes a clear rejection of the claim that accountability and innovation are incompatible. Europe, he argued, is proof that they are not. The EU’s AI Act, attacked by the Trump administration’s AI adviser at the same summit, has not prevented European companies from innovating or international companies from investing. What it has done — or aims to do — is ensure that innovation happens within a framework of legal responsibility. That framework, Macron argues, is what makes innovation sustainable.
The endorsements Macron received from Guterres, Modi and cautiously from within the tech industry itself suggest that the Delhi doctrine is finding an audience. Whether it finds legislative expression depends on what France’s G7 presidency produces and whether the momentum from Delhi can be sustained. But the doctrine itself — accountability before innovation, or accountability alongside it — is clear, coherent and increasingly hard to argue against.