PARIS: Ministers gathered for a digital G7 meeting in Paris Friday made progress on online child protection but only nodded to AI’s energy impact in a joint declaration on the sector’s challenges.

“Protecting minors online” is “an international priority”, France’s digital minister Anne Le Henanff said at a press conference after the summit chaired by France that capped months of negotiations.

The seven member countries -- Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the UK and US -- agreed to recognise “a set of principles” to protect children online, notably through “age verification, protection of minors from the design stage of digital services” and “tackling illegal content”, Le Henanff said.

The declaration will make it possible “to be far more demanding” towards digital platforms and “leave them no choice but to change their way of working”.

But while there was common ground on online child protection, differences remained over the environmental impact of computing.

A key sticking point with the United States, the energy impact of artificial intelligence was ultimately included in the final text, but only in terms of energy consumption.

The world’s seven largest advanced economies acknowledged that “the growing adoption of AI will place increasing pressure on electricity grids”.

AI firms’ growing pursuit of computing capacity is driving demand for energy to power data centres, as well as gobbling up rare raw materials for many of the high-end chips required.

“There can be no sustainable AI without resilient infrastructure, reliable energy and more efficient use of resources,” Le Henanff said, while conceding it would be “highly ambitious” to expect “very precise, robust actions from the United States”.

“We had a clear objective, in particular to secure recognition that this issue needs to be discussed, and that is what we achieved with the United States,” she said.

“At the start of the talks, that was not the case,” she added, noting that Washington will hold the G7 presidency next year.

Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2026