When Donald Trump told reporters on Tuesday that Versailles was "the real deal", he was talking about gold leaf. Yet the remark captured something broader about the summit in Évian: a gathering that has been, above all, about managing the reality of a transformed American presidency. French officials were quietly relieved that the mercurial US president stayed for the full three days — a notable contrast to the previous G7 in Canada, where he departed early and in poor temper. Emmanuel Macron sealed the moment with an invitation to dinner at the Palace of Versailles, the baroque seat of Louis XIV, after the summit concluded on Wednesday afternoon.

Yet the substantive agenda for the final day moved away from Trump's bilateral dramas and toward the digital world. The heads of OpenAI, Anthropic and European rival Mistral AI — Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Arthur Mensch respectively — were invited to lunch with the seven leaders, an unusual gesture that underscored how seriously governments now treat artificial intelligence as a geopolitical variable. Macron described the broader discussion as one designed "to improve cyber security and protect our children and our democracies." The question of children and social media has acquired concrete policy weight.

Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced earlier this week that children under 16 would be banned from social media platforms in the UK. France is considering a comparable measure.