Silicon Valley tech billionaires will land in Delhi this week for an AI summit hosted by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, the place leaders of the worldwide south will wrestle for management over the fast-developing know-how.
In the course of the week-long AI Affect Summit, attended by 1000’s of tech executives, authorities officers and AI security specialists, tech corporations valued at trillions of {dollars} will rub together with leaders of nations comparable to Kenya and Indonesia, the place common wages dip nicely beneath $1,000 a month.
Amid a push to hurry up AI adoption throughout the globe, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, the heads of Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, will all be there. Rishi Sunak and George Osborne, a former British prime minister and a former chancellor, will every be pushing for larger adoption of AI. Sunak has taken jobs for Microsoft and Anthropic and Osborne leads OpenAI’s push to deepen and widen the usage of ChatGPT past its current 800 million customers.
In the meantime Modi, who will deal with the summit on Thursday, is positioning India because the AI hub for south Asia and Africa. On the agenda will probably be AI’s potential to remodel agriculture, water provides and public well being. Governments in Kenya, Senegal, Mauritius, Togo, Indonesia and Egypt will ship ministers.
Modi’s enthusiasm for AI has a darker facet, civil liberties campaigners say. Final week they raised severe issues about India deploying AI to extend state surveillance, discriminate towards minorities and sway elections. However Modi this week spoke of “harnessing synthetic intelligence for human-centric progress” and India has given the summit the strapline: “Welfare for all, happiness for all.”
Summit observers discuss of a battle between a brand new form of AI colonialism from the US tech corporations and an alternate “techno-Gandhism”, by which AI is used for social justice and to profit marginalised individuals. After international AI summits within the UK, Korea and France, the Delhi assembly is the primary to be held within the international south.
Indian commentators say the take a look at of AI’s worth will not be in its technical sophistication however whether or not it could actually enhance the lives of individuals residing in among the hardest circumstances within the international south. Against this, US AI corporations are racing for supremacy, competing with one another and China, and rolling out AI for buying, private companionship and agentic methods that would slash company labour prices by making white-collar jobs redundant.
If a referee between the 2 sides is required, António Guterres, the secretary basic of the United Nations, will converse in Delhi. This week he mentioned it might be “completely unacceptable that AI could be only a privilege of essentially the most developed nations or a division solely between two superpowers”.
India’s AI Affect Summit is the fourth iteration of the occasion, which Sunak launched in 2023 at Bletchley Park within the UK, with a give attention to worldwide coordination to stop catastrophic dangers from essentially the most superior AI fashions. Summits adopted in Seoul in 2024 and Paris in 2025, the place the US vice-president, JD Vance, appeared to desert the White Home’s curiosity in security saying: “The AI future is not going to be gained by hand-wringing about security; it is going to be gained by constructing.”
Security is as soon as once more on the agenda, with Yoshua Bengio, one of many “godfathers” of AI, readily available to repeat his fears in regards to the danger of highly effective AI methods enabling cyber- and bioweapons assaults.
“The capabilities of AI have continued to advance, and though mitigation and danger administration of AI has additionally progressed [it has happened] not as rapidly,” he mentioned on Tuesday. “So it turns into pressing that leaders of this world perceive the place we might be going and it wants their consideration and intervention as quickly as doable.”
A type of working on the summit to verify AI stays secure will probably be Nicolas Miaihle, co-founder of the AI Security Join group, who famous that the summit was happening within the shadow of AI-enabled warfare in Ukraine and the Center East.
“The existential dangers are usually not going wherever,” he instructed the Guardian. “When Rishi Sunak began this, the race was not raging as arduous. The trillions are pouring in however we’re very far-off from securing these fashions. That is profound for democracy, profound for the psychological well being of our youngsters and profound for warfare.”
However the Trump administration continues its coverage of refusing to bind US AI corporations with pink tape. The White Home will not be anticipated to ship a high-level consultant to Delhi, with Sriram Krishnan, its senior AI coverage adviser, the highest-ranked speaker listed within the programme.
“Given the place we’re with the US administration it’s fairly unlikely you’re going to have an enormous breakthrough on any consensus on what a regulatory framework will appear like,” mentioned one senior AI firm supply.
Corporations comparable to Google are centered on the usage of AI in schooling in India, the place giant language fashions’ capability to perform in lots of the nation’s dozens of languages is a bonus.
“[There’s] a giant give attention to entry and adoption, how are you going to ensure that the know-how is offered as broadly as doable,” mentioned Owen Larter, head of frontier AI coverage and public affairs at Google DeepMind. “We’re excited on the schooling entrance in India. It’s a outstanding story of an extremely intense adoption. About 90% of academics and college students already utilizing AI of their studying. We’ve had a giant promotional programme the place 2 million college students have entry to our professional subscription free of charge.”
Google’s investments in India embody a $15bn spend, in partnership with the conglomerate of Gautam Adani, one in all India’s richest billionaires, on an gigawatt-scale AI datacentre hub within the coastal metropolis of Visakhapatnam, in Andhra Pradesh, with subsea cables connecting to different components of the world.
