Discours de Sa Majesté la Reine sur le enfants et les technologies numériques

The Invisible Architecture:

Building Safe Digital Systems for Children

New York, 21 septembre 2026

Excellencies,

Ladies and gentlemen,

 

Digital technologies and artificial intelligence is advancing at an unprecedented speed. The emergence of powerful frontier models and the integration of AI into everyday applications are opening up new possibilities across every sector of society.

But they also raise profound challenges. It is essential that digital technologies and AI is shaped and governed in a manner that reflects our shared values, rather than becoming a race to the bottom where technological advantage is pursued at any cost.

One of the most pressing issues in this regard has to do with the impact of artificial intelligence on children. It has become a major topic in international debates in recent months, with growing recognition of the urgent need to protect children from the risks associated with this technology.

For a long time, the focus was mainly on privacy protection, but today, child safety in relation to technology is recognized as a governance issue, calling for a comprehensive approach that goes beyond just parental control, content moderation, or data protection, making child safety by design a central goal of AI governance.

Earlier this year, the UN’s Scientific Panel on AI concluded that children are among the groups most exposed to emerging AI-related risks.

It warns about the potential effects of algorithmic personalization, exposure to harmful or misleading content, anthropomorphic conversational systems, and business models based on attention capture, which can impact young users' well-being, autonomy, mental health, cognitive development, and social interactions.

Children are also more vulnerable to the malicious use of deepfake technologies and cyberbullying, and risk becoming isolated or dependent on AI toys and conversational chatbots.

I want to be clear in this regard: children cannot be the subjects of a global tech experiment, nor the adjustment variable for business models based on data collection and attention capture. They must be recognized as rights holders, whose best interests guide technological, regulatory, and economic decisions.

As a particularly vulnerable group, children must be protected and empowered. We have a collective responsibility to act to safeguard children’s rights, safety and well-being.

What we need is an ambitious approach, based on fundamental rights, supplier responsibility, protection by design, and effective international cooperation, whereby the aim is not to remove children from innovation, but to ensure that innovation actually contributes to their development, autonomy and well-being.

AI can contribute to the education, inclusion and development of children. However, these benefits will only be sustainable if their safety is integrated into the design of technologies and ensured throughout the life cycle of systems.

I thank you.