Keeping Children Safe in the Age of AI
AI is entering children's lives faster than the safeguards designed to protect them.
Young people are interacting with AI through social platforms, chatbots, educational tools, search, entertainment, and increasingly through products designed to simulate conversation and relationships. These technologies can offer real benefits, but emerging harms are raising urgent questions about what happens when powerful AI systems are deployed without adequate protections for children.
The risks go beyond screen time or inappropriate content. AI can shape how children seek advice, form relationships, understand themselves, and interact with other people during critical stages of development. Concerns around manipulation, harmful recommendations, privacy, exploitation, and children's right to meaningful human relationships all require a broader definition of online safety.
The question should not simply be how parents and young people can protect themselves from unsafe technology. What responsibility should technology companies have to make their products safe by design? What safeguards should exist before children encounter these systems? Where is regulation needed? And what should developers, policymakers, parents, educators, and advocates be doing now rather than waiting for evidence of further harm?
This session will explore what a child-centered approach to AI safety looks like, one that protects children not only from immediate online harms but also their ability to develop, build relationships, exercise agency, and reach their full potential.
Discussion Group Leaders
Daniel Alvarez is Data Science Lead - Innovation Manager at UNICEF, advancing data science and technology solutions that strengthen innovation and impact across international development and humanitarian action.
Julie Scelfo is Founder & Executive Director at Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA), advancing healthier childhoods by mobilizing families and advocating for protections against addictive and harmful digital technologies.
What to Expect
A candid conversation about the emerging risks AI poses to children and what meaningful safeguards could look like. Participants will examine child online safety alongside questions of AI design, accountability, regulation, healthy development, and human relationships.
The discussion will focus on moving from reacting to individual harms toward creating protections that anticipate risk and make children's safety a responsibility of the systems they use, not simply of children and parents themselves.
Who This Is For
This session is for parents, child safety advocates, technology companies, policymakers, educators, researchers, funders, children's rights organizations, and others working at the intersection of AI, technology, childhood, and online safety.
What You Will Get Out of It
A clearer understanding of how AI introduces new dimensions to child online safety
Perspectives on how AI may affect children's development and human relationships
Principles for thinking about what “safe by design” should mean for children
A clearer view of the responsibilities of technology companies, policymakers, parents, and educators
Practical questions for developing safeguards before harms become more widespread