The fourth global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Summit has begun in India under the banner of “bringing the world together”, marking the first time the event has been hosted in a Global South country.
The summit’s programme is organised around seven interconnected focus areas (or Chakras) that aim to foster greater multilateral cooperation around AI development, while translating three broader principles (or Sutras) of people, planet and progress into concrete areas of action.
These seven areas include safety and trust, democratising resources, and AI for economic development and social good.
Inaugurating the five-day summit, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi declared: “AI must be anchored in human values and aligned with humanity’s collective progress.”
He added: “India has the talent and entrepreneurial energy to become an AI powerhouse, not just as a consumer, but a creator.”
In line with the focus of this year’s summit, panel discussions will revolve around infrastructure, safety, digital public goods and cross-border cooperation.
The Indian government will also release thematic “casebooks” covering AI in health, energy, education, agriculture, gender empowerment and disabilities, which will showcase a variety of real-world AI applications that industry and policymakers can learn from.
Touted as the biggest AI summit yet, the Indian government said it is expecting 250,000 visitors, including 20 national leaders, 45 ministerial-level delegations and numerous figures from the global technology sector.
This includes French president Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, along with Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft president Brad Smith.
From the UK, the delegation will include deputy prime minister David Lammy and AI minister Kanishka Narayan.
Now, the India AI Impact Summit will revolve largely around addressing the fundamental gap that persists between the inclusive rhetoric around AI and the reality on the ground.
“The global AI divide continues to widen, with AI resources and capabilities concentrated among select nations and corporations. This concentration fundamentally limits the development of social, cultural and linguistically contextual AI solutions, constraining AI’s potential to accelerate progress toward our collective development goals, especially for the Global South,” said the summit organisers.
“Simultaneously, AI’s rapid proliferation across society is creating new challenges that demand urgent attention: disrupting traditional employment patterns, exacerbating existing biases and driving exponential increases in energy consumption.
“These developments underscore the urgent need to move beyond aspirational frameworks toward concrete, measurable impact that addresses both AI’s promise and its perils.”
Unlike previous events, the India summit has evolved into an all-purpose trade show, with exhibition halls displaying diagnostic tools powered by machine learning, agritech platforms promising precision for small farmers, multilingual language models tuned to India’s linguistic diversity, and public service dashboards designed to streamline governance.
With Delhi hotel rooms touching $6,000 a night, it is a reasonable forecast that the summit will prioritise the interests of power and profit Apar Gupta, Internet Freedom Foundation
However, the previous AI Impact Summits have not resulted in joint binding political agreements, with Apar Gupta, founder director of the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), warning that this latest edition risks being little more than a spectacle if policy does not match rhetoric.
“Perhaps, if the summit is viewed more pragmatically across the hundreds of events and the flood of emails and PDFs it will generate, it should be mostly understood as spectacle,” he wrote.
“Here, the slogan of AI providing ‘welfare for all, happiness for all’ matches the massive scale of event organising as a communications objective to produce narratives at volume.
“With Delhi hotel rooms touching $6,000 a night, it is a reasonable forecast that the summit will prioritise the interests of power and profit, not only across the hundreds of panels and talks, but also in the deal-making that will be done behind closed doors.”
The opening day was also marred by complaints of poor organisation and crowd management, with India’s information technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw having to apologise to exhibitors for “any issues or inconvenience” as social media was flooded with complaints.
Many exhibitors complained, for example, that security sweeps and last-minute closures left them stranded outside the exhibition halls, while some even complained of their products being stolen from the venue.
UK aims at supercharging growth
The UK is expected to use the summit to redouble efforts to use AI to transform public services, create jobs and drive renewal for people worldwide.
According to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), deputy prime minister Lammy will speak on a high-level panel on the last day of the summit about unlocking opportunity through global languages, announcing UK support for an African Language Hub that will enable AI to work in 40 African languages.
It is one of three projects being announced as part of the £100m AI for Development (AI4D) programme, aimed at ensuring South Asian and African countries benefit from the AI revolution.
“AI is the defining technology of our generation – and we’re determined to make sure it delivers for everyone,” said AI minister Narayan. “It can cut waiting times, transform public services, create new jobs and give hard-working communities a fresh start – and that’s exactly the message we’re taking to the summit.
“It is central to our plans for delivering national renewal, but its benefits can’t and shouldn’t be reserved for the few.”
While the UK government failed to provide an exact reason for its refusal to sign the statement, a spokesperson for Starmer said at the time that the government would “only ever sign up to initiatives that are in UK national interests”.
Vance, for example, rebuked European efforts to curb AI’s risks, warning that excessive regulation could hobble the rapidly growing AI industry. He also criticised cooperation with China, as well as any regulation that threatens the interests of US companies.
“We feel very strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship,” he said.
Bridging the AI divide
In the run-up to the summit, the Indian cabinet approved a $1.1bn state-backed venture capital programme that will channel government money into startups through private investors, doubling down on its effort to finance high-risk areas such as artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and other sectors broadly referred to by the industry as deep tech.
IT minister Vaishnaw highlighted the scale of India’s startup expansion, noting that the number of startups has grown from fewer than 500 in 2016 to more than 200,000 today. More than 49,000 startups were registered in 2025 alone, the highest annual number on record.
We are building the infrastructure, policy ecosystem and skills base required for India to move from participating in the AI revolution to shaping it Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s minister of electronics and IT
This builds on the IndiaAI initiative launched in late 2024 to build an ecosystem that fosters AI development, with a particular focus on democratising access, improving data quality, attracting talent and promoting ethical approaches.
With a population of 1.4 billion and one of the largest digital user bases in the world, Modi highlighted at the summit India’s transformative potential in the AI revolution, noting the country could leverage these foundations to craft AI pathways distinct from those of the Western and Chinese models.
“We are not just nurturing talent, but we are building the infrastructure, policy ecosystem and skills base required for India to move from participating in the AI revolution to shaping it,” said Vaishnaw.
India has a large tech workforce, and has attracted some big infrastructure investments from the likes of Google, Nvidia and Amazon.
While there are significant AI hubs in India, including in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mumbai, the world’s biggest US AI chatbots do not work in all of India’s 22 official languages, let alone the hundreds of dialects that exist within them. To counter this, India is building its own sovereign AI platforms. However, progress has been relatively slow.
The 2026 International AI safety report noted that while “in some countries over 50% of the population uses AI, across much of Africa, Asia and Latin America, adoption rates likely remain below 10%”.
Rhetoric vs reality
The summit’s rhetoric of “democratising AI and bridging the AI divide” has been criticised by global policy researchers for obscuring troubling domestic realities.
A recent joint report by the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate and the IFF warned of a stark disconnect between India’s official AI rhetoric and the ground reality.
It highlighted how AI-enabled hate, discrimination, surveillance, repression and violence against minority and marginalised communities is occurring in an overall environment of democratic backsliding.
IFF founder director Gupta highlighted that India has already signalled a deregulatory and technocratic approach to AI technologies.
In January 2026, the chief minister of Maharashtra, the second-most populous state in India, announced it had been developing an AI tool to identify “suspected Bangladeshis” and Rohingya refugees based on language and speech patterns.
This comes amidst a wider context of inhumane and wrongful deportations of Bengali-speaking Muslim citizens to Bangladesh under the guise of being illegal immigrants.
Experts have criticised building such a tool, warning it could become an instrument to discriminate against low-income migrant workers from Assam and West Bengal.
With nearly 30 million Bengali-origin Muslim Indians increasingly susceptible to police brutality, the use of predictive policing algorithms risks automating and amplifying existing biases.
Muslim minorities, Caste-oppressed Dalit and indigenous Adivasi communities constitute a disproportionate majority of the “undertrials” in India’s prisons – this refers to an accused person who is being held in custody by a court of law and is awaiting trial for a crime, who make up 75% of the Indian prison population.
Just a week before the India AI Impact Summit, a state unit of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) uploaded an AI-generated video on its official X account, depicting the chief minister of Assam, a northeastern state slated for elections, shooting at two visibly Muslim men.
This reflects a wider trend of generative AI accelerating the production and circulation of dehumanising content targeting Muslim communities in India.
Jonathan is a tech enthusiast and the mind behind Tech AI Verse. With a passion for artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and emerging innovations, he deliver clear, insightful content to keep readers informed. From cutting-edge gadgets to AI advancements and cryptocurrency trends, Jonathan breaks down complex topics to make technology accessible to all.
