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Prof. Ernesto Caffo Speaks at Copenhagen Summit on Children’s Safety in the AI Era
Prof. Ernesto Caffo, Founder and President of Fondazione Telefono Azzurro, took part today as a keynote speaker in the inaugural Copenhagen Summit Keeping Our Children and Families Safe in the AI Era, hosted at Christiansborg Palace — the seat of the Danish Parliament — by Common Sense Media and Save the Children Denmark (Red Barnet), with the institutional support of Margrethe Vestager.
The Summit brought together an exceptional line-up of political leaders, researchers, and child protection advocates to address the urgent challenge of governing artificial intelligence in ways that safeguard the safety, health, and development of children worldwide.
Among those present: Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission; Mette Frederiksen, Acting Prime Minister of Denmark; Dr. Vivek Murthy, former U.S. Surgeon General; Hillary Rodham Clinton, former U.S.
Secretary of State; and Prof. Yoshua Bengio, one of the world’s leading AI researchers.
The event was inaugurated by His Majesty The King of Denmark and also featured an address by Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Edinburgh and a video message from Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament.
Youth &AI: Where We Go Next
Prof. Caffo participated in the afternoon panel Youth & AI: Where We Go Next, moderated by Bruce Reed, Head of AI at Common Sense Media.
The session moved deliberately beyond the evidence of harm — well established by the morning’s presentations — to focus on what a concrete institutional and policy response must look like.
Prof. Caffo was joined on the panel by Chris Sherwood, Chief Executive of the NSPCC, and Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, Chief Impact Officer of the ACE Resource Network and former Surgeon General of California.
Prof. Caffo brought to the panel the distinctive perspective of nearly forty years of civil society work in child protection and clinical psychiatry — a long institutional memory that the debate on AI and children urgently needs. His contribution centred on what children require from the adults and institutions around them that current AI systems are making harder to provide, and on what the global response must get right that earlier responses to social media and the internet got wrong.
His participation at the Summit also reflects his leading role in the international initiative Child Dignity in the AI Era, developed together with Fondazione Child and Childlight, which frames the AI challenge not only as a safety and regulatory question but as a matter of rights, development, and human dignity. As Prof. Caffo has written:
“Children grow up in a digital ecosystem that knows everything about their behaviour yet nothing about their soul.”
The Summit also served as the launch platform for the Youth AI Safety Institute, announced on 5 May 2026 by Common Sense Media — an independent research and testing organisation dedicated to ensuring that the AI products children use are safe and developmentally appropriate, modelled on the independent crash-test rating
system for consumer safety.
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, a fellow panellist with Prof. Caffo, serves on the Institute’s Board of Advisors.
Telefono Azzurro continues to follow international developments on AI and child protection with active engagement at the policy and scientific level, contributing Italy’s experience of nearly four decades of listening to children in crisis to the global conversation on what a responsible AI future must look like.
