Making AI safe for children before it's too late (with Anne-Sophie Seret)

The tech industry is building powerful AI tools for children, often without understanding how children actually learn and grow. That's the gap Anne-Sophie Seret set out to close. Anne-Sophie is the co-founder and Executive Director of everyone.ai, a Silicon Valley nonprofit bridging artificial intelligence and developmental neuroscience. She is also the Chief Program Officer of iRAISE (International Research-driven Alliance for AI Serving Every child), the global coalition she launched at the Paris AI Action Summit alongside 11 governments, UNESCO, UNICEF, and companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. In this episode, she and Svenia explore why children's brains are not mini adult brains, and why that changes everything for AI design. They discuss the critical developmental windows AI is currently disrupting (0–6 for language acquisition; 12–14 for social skills development), what the research on teenagers and anthropomorphic AI actually shows, and where the line is between AI as a scaffold and AI as a crutch. Anne-Sophie also shares the story of how iRAISE was built in just three months, what a "proactive" approach to AI safety looks like in practice, and why regulating AI is actually easier when children are the focus. She also previews the AI Safety Builder, a new science-backed tool launching at VivaTech that helps EdTech founders evaluate how their conversational AI interacts with children, detecting anthropomorphic, interactional, and relational risk cues based on the work of 30+ researchers. Resources mentioned: everyone.ai — nonprofit at the intersection of AI and child development iRAISE Coalition — launched at the Paris AI Action Summit (February 2025) https://parispeaceforum.org/initiativ... Research: "Adolescents & Anthropomorphic AI: Rethinking Design for Wellbeing" https://everyone.ai/wp-content/upload... Research: "Mapping of generative AI impacts on child development" — mapping of risks and opportunities by age group, contributed to the G7 agenda https://everyone.ai/wp-content/upload... Book recommendation: Love to Learn by Isabelle Hau (Stanford) https://www.isabellehau.com/