Warren – Gen Z and Gen AI: Youth Mental Health at the G7 Evian Summit

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Gen Z and Gen AI: Youth Mental Health at the G7 Evian Summit

Brittaney Warren, G7 Research Group
June 16, 2026

Perhaps the biggest challenge at the G7’s Evian Summit on June 15–17, 2026, is to reassure the world that it can stand against disruptive threats to the rules-based international order and multilateral collaborative governance. This may be a driving motivation for France’s President Emmanuel Macron to focus on a narrower set of issues than the G7 typically does. Among the G7’s focus are disruptive technologies – namely artificial intelligence (AI), including generative AI. Alongside hard security concerns, such as government data breaches, the impact of AI on youth mental health has been flagged as a critical and urgent concern at this summit.

G7 digital and technology ministers met two weeks before their heads of government gathered, to lay the groundwork for a principles-based framework to protect children and adolescents from the grave risks the rapid deployment of AI poses to this population. This work resulted in a set of seven guiding principles, and a call to AI companies to translate these principles into operational terms for implementation.

The principles reflect tensions in conflicting goals and ethical considerations. For example, Principles 2 and 3 emphasize improved parental controls to support parents in reducing children’s screen time and that digital companies “should not maximize minors’ attention and engagement online.” This stands in contrast to the goal of AI companies, which is to capture and sustain – i.e., maximize – attention.

Research shows that there are instances where social media can be beneficial, such as if it serves to increase connection, particularly for queer or other marginalized groups. Decreased loneliness is a function of increased connection, which is an important protective factor against a range of mental health challenges, such as anxiety and depression. However, attention and connection are not inherently positively correlated. Hyper-fixation on “likes” or manipulative design features such as persistent recommended content and intermittent reinforcement to elicit endless scrolling – features made more efficient with AI integration – reflect parasocial more than social behaviour. That is, they produce a one-sided, unreciprocated, false sense of intimacy. Principle 5 directs focus on critical engagement with digital technologies and on age-appropriate AI literacy.

Adolescents are biologically vulnerable to features designed to keep attention, as the brain region associated with desires for attention and peer reinforcement is highly sensitive and the brain region associated with self-control is not yet fully developed. This reinforces the criticality of the digital and technology ministers’ direction to AI companies to not target teenager’s attention. This suggests an implicit acknowledgement of the limits of individual users in the face of psychologically manipulative designs.

Indeed, the G7’s digital and technology ministers understand the health risks to minors, acknowledging that the risk exposure from digital service providers and AI chatbots in particular is severe. The identified risks include sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse; grooming to prepare a vulnerable person to engage in exploitation; and deceptive, violent and coercive interactions and content. In their declaration, the digital and technology ministers stated that “this type of abuse can have prolonged trauma for victims.” Principle 3 thereby calls on the AI industry to endorse the Voluntary Principles to Counter Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.

Now, the G7 leaders gathered in Evian are scheduled on the last day of their summit to meet with recognizable names in the AI industry who would prefer not to be bound by legally binding or regulatory rules. This approach contrasts with what some G7 members have begun instituting, such as social media bans in response to the ineffectiveness of voluntary safeguards that are being poorly implemented with dangerous and permanent consequences to young people’s lives.

But the G7 club is not a forum for making legally binding rules. As such, the Evian Summit is set to attempt to at least strengthen the foundation for principled direction setting on the safe and responsible use of AI. This is just a start for addressing the mental health and well-being of generation Z’s exposure to generative AI.

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	Please send comments to: g7@utoronto.ca This page was last updated June 16, 2026.