Prince Harry travelled to New York to attend the Clinton Global Initiative, where he was slated to speak on the first main‑stage session titled “Getting Disruption Right.”
During his brief remarks, the prince said, “The damage was already done to a generation of children and parents. We do not have years for what comes next,” before a long pause and the concluding words, “And that’s it.”
He described how parents are already mourning children who took their own lives after being “engulfed by social media,” underscoring a growing mental‑health crisis among young people.
Harry said new lawsuits have been filed and settled that allege AI companion chatbots contributed to those deaths, noting that teenagers “trusted them with things no child should have been left alone to ask an algorithm.”
He pointed to recent progress in American courts against firms such as Meta and to legislative moves aimed at banning minors’ access to social‑media platforms, but warned that “bans, settlements, and payouts are incomplete remedies. Bans do nothing to address dangerous design.”
The speech was part of the “Getting Disruption Right” session, but technical difficulties forced Harry off the stage earlier than planned.
In a separate claim unrelated to the conference, author Charles Spencer alleges in his book that the King, then the Prince of Wales, once said about Princess Diana, “we’ll forget her soon enough,” during an argument over whether Princes William and Harry should walk behind their mother’s coffin at her funeral.