Leaders Gather for Inaugural Copenhagen Youth AI Summit as Common Sense Media Brings Youth AI Safety Institute to Europe

BRUSSELS / COPENHAGEN, 11 May 2026 — Common Sense Media will bring its newly launched Youth AI Safety Institute to Europe tomorrow as senior policymakers, technology executives, educators and young people gather at the Danish Parliament. Keeping Our Children and Families Safe in the AI Era is a high-level Summit focused on how governments, industry and civil society can make artificial intelligence safer and more developmentally appropriate for children.

The European debut comes alongside new four-country (Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands and Poland) polling from Common Sense Media, SocialSphere, Inc. and YouGov showing both the urgency and the public mandate for stronger AI safeguards. Across these EU member states, only 8% of parents and 27% of teens are confident AI companies are prioritising the safety of teenagers. 77% of parents want strong laws governing AI, while just 14% trust companies to innovate responsibly without regulation.

The Summit, taking place tomorrow, Tuesday 12 May 2026, will convene more than 200 leading policymakers, technology executives, educators, civil society leaders and young people at Christiansborg Palace. It is co-hosted by Common Sense Media, Save the Children Denmark and Margrethe Vestager, former Executive Vice-President of the European Commission, with the opening address delivered by His Majesty The King of Denmark, Patron of Save the Children Denmark.

Confirmed speakers include:

• His Majesty King Frederik X of Denmark
• Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission
• Margrethe Vestager, Former Executive Vice President of the European Commission
• Hillary Rodham Clinton, Former U.S. Secretary of State
• Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Edinburgh
• Mette Frederiksen, Prime Minister of Denmark
• Professor Yoshua Bengio, A.M. Turing Award winner, Scientific Director, LawZero
• Dr. Vivek Murthy, Former U.S. Surgeon General
• Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen, CEO, Save the Children Denmark
• Melanie Dawes, Chief Executive, Ofcom
• Chris Sherwood, Chief Executive, NSPCC
• Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, First Surgeon General of California
• Bill Ready, CEO, Pinterest
• And more

The Common Sense Media Youth AI Safety Institute—launched globally on 5 May 2026—is the independent global standards, evaluation and measurement body for child-safe AI. The Institute sets rigorous safety standards, independently tests AI products against those standards and publishes the results to provide transparency and accountability.

As part of the Summit in Copenhagen, the Institute will be formally introduced to European audiences for the first time. As an independent body, it generates the standards, evaluations, research and evidence that complement efforts by regulators and policymakers to translate frameworks such as the EU AI Act, the Digital Services Act, and the UK Online Safety Act into practical protections for child-safe AI.

Key findings

• Low trust in AI is broad-based: Confidence in AI companies remains very low across families. Only 8% of parents trust AI companies to prioritise their teens' safety. For each of the six AI harms tested for, more than four in five parents expressed concern, from inaccurate information to unauthorized data collection. The finding points to a structural and systemic trust gap, not a narrow reaction among one group of parents.
• Parent-teen divide: 66% of parents believe AI will change life as dramatically as the internet or electricity. But while 59% of teens say AI will help society in the long term, only 40% of parents agree.
• Parents and teens have different perceptions of AI: 38% of teens use AI daily or most days, against 23% of parents. Parents overestimate teen use of AI for companionship by a factor of four, 20% vs. 5% actual, and for personal advice, 33% vs. 18%, while underestimating the most common teen use: searching for information, 39% vs. 56% actual.
• Teen optimism is paired with concern about what may be lost: 74% of teens are interested in AI tools that could help them learn—yet 78% agree they need to learn to think critically without AI, and 27% say AI makes them less motivated to try on their own.
• Schools are the clearest policy opening: 50% of teens say AI will positively impact their learning; only 22% of parents agree. Yet 71% of teens and 66% of parents believe schools should teach students how to use AI responsibly—creating common ground for policy and practice.
• Different member countries, different teen perspectives: Spanish teens are the most optimistic about AI's long-term impact, with 77% saying it will help, while Dutch teens are the least optimistic, at 48%. Danish teens lead daily use at 49%; Dutch teens trail at 28%. Polish teens report among the highest concern levels across AI harms, while Danish teens report the lowest average concern, at 55% across the six risks tested.

Read our full report here.

Quotes for Inclusion in Reporting

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission:

"Our children are growing up in a digital world shaped by addictive algorithms. But it should be parents, not platforms, that raise them. Together, Europe must forge a harmonised approach and set new standards. Not by rejecting technology, but by protecting our children."

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Former U.S. Secretary of State:

"Social media was a societal experiment unleashed on young people without oversight, accountability, or consequence for those who profited from it. We are still reckoning with what that cost us. AI will be more complex, more pervasive, and more consequential. That demands urgent investment, dedicated institutions, and leaders willing to be both vocal and unrelenting. Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute is driving the kind of accountability this moment requires — and I'm looking forward to joining that global conversation in Copenhagen."

James P. Steyer, Founder and CEO, Common Sense Media (Summit Host):

"European parents are telling us something governments and companies cannot ignore: They believe AI will change their children's lives as profoundly as the internet, and they do not trust the companies building it to get child safety right on their own. Eight percent—that is the share of parents across the four countries we surveyed who are confident AI companies are prioritising teen safety. For more than two decades, Common Sense Media has built the standards, ratings and research that families trust through every major technological transformation young people have lived through, from streaming to social media. Our Youth AI Safety Institute applies that work to AI: independent standards, real testing and clear accountability for the products young people use. Copenhagen is where that mission begins in Europe."

Margrethe Vestager, former Executive Vice President of the European Commission (Summit Co-Host):

"Regulation can draw boundaries—I know that from experience. But rules alone do not raise a child. We owe the next generation both protection and agency: the safety to explore, and the skills to judge for themselves. That is what we must act on now. We're in Copenhagen to advance this critical work on May 12, which marks the European debut of Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute—a key part of the global AI safety ecosystem."

Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen, Secretary General, Save the Children Denmark:

"Children have a right to be safe in every space they live in—and today, one of those spaces is the conversation they are having with an AI model on their phone. The Copenhagen Summit is about ensuring that their rights are protected. The young people we are bringing into that room are not there to be observed. They are there to be listened to. It is paramount that child protection is front and center in the AI era and not merely an afterthought."

Yoshua Bengio, A.M. Turing Award winner, Scientific Director, LawZero:

"The way frontier AI models are currently trained leads to the emergence of concerning, uncontrolled behaviours, many of which pose significant risks for society writ large, and especially for children and vulnerable people. We've already begun to see the troubling—and sometimes tragic—consequences of AI's sycophancy, deception and hallucinations. As the speed of AI development increasingly compromises safety, we must act now to introduce stronger technical and societal safeguards. I look forward to discussing these urgent global issues in Copenhagen this week."

Chris Sherwood, CEO of the NSPCC:

"Like electricity and the internet, AI will redesign society as we know it. The benefits will be huge but, left free to evolve and advance, the harms are almost beyond our imagination. We are already seeing through our Childline service how children and young people are bearing some of the brunt of this impact, and we need to act swiftly and decisively to avoid the same mistakes we made with social media. Ensuring AI is safe and works for us is one of the greatest and most pressing challenges of our times and cannot be achieved operating in national silos and without the insight and opinions of the young people who now navigate the online world on a daily basis. The Summit will see global decision makers of today and potentially tomorrow coming together to grasp these issues and hopefully forge a blueprint for how we ensure the lives of children and young people will be helped by this revolutionary technology and not hindered and harmed."

Global Mission, European Debut: About the Common Sense Media Youth AI Institute

Modelled on the independent crash-test rating system that transformed automotive safety, the Youth AI Safety Institute applies the same approach to AI: testing the products children use most, showing parents and policymakers the results and holding industry accountable to meet a high standard of youth safety. Its work also includes original research on youth and AI behaviour, public education for families, and study of AI's impact on education.

The Institute will operate under Common Sense Media, a nonprofit with a 23-year track record of protecting and preparing families for the digital age. Philanthropic funders include Lee Ainslie of Maverick Capital, Jim Coulter of TPG, John H. N. Fisher of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Paul Tudor Jones of Tudor Investment Corp., Gene Sykes of Goldman Sachs and the Walton Family Foundation. Industry-related funders include Anthropic, the OpenAI Foundation and Pinterest. The Institute is solely responsible for its standards, research and evaluations, and maintains complete editorial independence over published results.

The Institute is working alongside a network of strategy, research and technical partners, including Transluce, Humane Intelligence, and Stanford Medicine's Brainstorm Lab for Mental Health Innovation. It is guided by a Board of Advisors composed of distinguished experts in AI, youth development, child safety, mental health and education, including Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, former Surgeon General of California; John King Jr., Chancellor of the State University of New York; John Giannandrea, former senior leader of AI at Apple and Google; Dr. Jenny Radesky, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School; and Mehran Sahami, Tencent Chair of the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. Dr. Vivek Murthy, former Surgeon General of the United States and a member of Common Sense Media's Board of Directors, will be the Board's liaison to the Institute's Board of Advisors.

About Common Sense Media

Common Sense Media is the leading nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families by providing the research-backed information, education and independent voice they need to thrive in the age of apps, algorithms and AI. We rate, educate and advocate to protect and prepare kids online. Our ratings, research and resources reach more than 150 million users globally, over 1.5 million educators and more than 100,000 schools worldwide every year. Learn more at commonsense.org.