UNICEF says children are adopting AI three times faster than adults

A 10-country analysis finds 20 million children already using AI tools, with governance struggling to keep pace with a generation growing up inside what UNICEF calls “a global experiment.”

An estimated 20 million children across ten countries have already used artificial intelligence, and they are picking it up more than three times faster than the adults around them, according to a UNICEF statement published on 30 June.

The figure comes from new analysis timed to land just ahead of the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance, and it lands with a warning attached: the rules meant to protect children online are not keeping up with how fast they have moved in.

The numbers come from Disrupting Harm Phase 2, a research effort run by UNICEF’s Office of Strategy and Evidence at Innocenti alongside ECPAT International and INTERPOL, funded by Safe Online.

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Fieldwork covered Armenia, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Jordan, Mexico, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Pakistan and Serbia, with roughly 1,000 internet-using children aged 12 to 17 and 1,000 of their parents or caregivers surveyed in each country.

UNICEF and Ipsos then weighted the national figures against UN population data to build the global estimates. Two findings anchor the release.

More than two million children, about one in ten, said they turn to AI for advice about things that worry them. A separate estimate puts 13 million children using AI tools to help with schoolwork and homework, which is the more mundane use case but by far the larger one.

UNICEF’s framing is not celebratory. “Children are more exposed to AI systems, including how they are designed, their underlying business models, and how their own data is used, yet have far less power to avoid or challenge them,” the organisation said in the statement.

It argues that children feel the effects of weak governance first and live with the consequences longest, while most AI governance in practice does not treat them as a distinct group at all.

That tension between fast uptake and thin protection has already shaped other fights over kids’ online safety legislation working through the US Congress, and Florida’s lawsuit against OpenAI over chatbot safety for young users.

The children surveyed are not naive about the risks, per UNICEF’s data. A third said they worried about AI being used to scam people or spread misinformation.

A quarter feared having their own images or videos manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes, a concern UNICEF has raised before in a separate statement on deepfake abuse drawing on the same underlying research programme. UNICEF’s ask, addressed to governments and the private sector, is a five-point list.

It calls for more research into AI’s effects on child development, tougher laws against AI-enabled sexual exploitation, safety and transparency built into AI systems by design, wider AI literacy support for children and caregivers, and investment in connectivity so the gap between countries does not widen further.

None of it is new territory for the agency, though the scale of the adoption number sitting underneath the request is.

The three-times figure describes adoption speed rather than volume of use, a distinction UNICEF’s own wording does not fully spell out. Plenty of adults are still finding their footing with generative tools, a pattern TNW has tracked in workplace adoption data.

Programmes like Malta’s national AI literacy course suggest one policy direction, pairing access with structured teaching before children and parents are left to work it out alone.

UNICEF has not put a date on when any of its recommendations might be adopted, nor named which governments or companies it considers furthest behind.

What it does say plainly is that the window for shaping the rules is closing at the same speed children are opening the apps.