The world\u2019s largest-ever AI summit took place in India this week, with hundreds of thousands of people, including world leaders and CEOs of AI companies, descending upon New Delhi for six days.<\/p>\n
It was the fourth in a series of summits that were initially designed as a place for governments to coordinate global action in the face of threats from advanced AI.<\/p>\n
India\u2019s technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said at least 70 signatories were expected to commit to what has been dubbed the “Delhi Declaration” on AI at the summit. Few details were available about that declaration, except that it pledged that \u201cAI’s promise is best realised only when its benefits are shared by humanity,\u201d according to a European Union press release. Vaishnaw said the final draft would be released on Saturday, along with a full list of signatories. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis AI impact summit has been a grand success on many fronts,\u201d Vaishnaw said. \u201cThe world has confidence in India\u2019s role in the new AI age.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the India summit, like one in Paris before it, functioned as much as a trade fair and an advertisement for the host nation\u2019s AI prowess as a venue for international diplomacy.<\/p>\n
China, the world\u2019s second largest AI power and India\u2019s strategic adversary, was all but absent from the summit, which fell on the same week as Chinese New Year.<\/p>\n
And official \u201cfrontier AI commitments<\/a>\u201d released during the summit made no overt mention of previous summits\u2019 attempts to coordinate government action on addressing AI risks. Instead, a set of voluntary commitments announced by the Indian government emphasized the importance of sharing data on real-world AI usage and building mechanisms to improve AI in under-represented languages.<\/p>\n \u201cFull global consensus on how to govern AI is a far cry from reality,\u201d says Isabella Wilkinson, a research fellow at the British foreign affairs think-tank Chatham House. \u201cThe core issue is how to incentivize countries and companies to get around the same table \u2026 despite fragmented geopolitics, intense competition, and the drive for ever-more powerful and -profitable AI. None of this is particularly conducive to global cooperation.\u201d<\/p>\n The event\u2019s host, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was pictured on Thursday with a lineup of the AI world\u2019s most powerful figures, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman<\/a>, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei<\/a>, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis<\/a>, among others. Many AI companies announced significant deals and partnerships with Indian companies over the course of the week, underlining the event\u2019s growing power as a venue for serious moneymaking. And India touted its domestic tech industry, and its government-run digital public infrastructure, as ostensible evidence of its ability to stake out on its own in the AI race, without relying too much on foreign technology.<\/p>\n The event was widely criticized for what many said was its chaotic organization, including widespread road closures for VIP motorcades that caused traffic snarls across the city. Huge crowds at the venue \u2014 which was open to the public on its first couple of days \u2014 contributed to long queues and some delegates being unable to attend their panels. In an apt metaphor for the gender balance of AI as a whole, the \u201cladies\u2019 queues\u201d for security were far shorter than the men\u2019s. And despite the huge crowds on earlier days, the CEOs of OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic delivered their remarks to a more than half-empty hall on Thursday, after entry to the venue was restricted at short notice, apparently for security reasons.\u00a0<\/p>\n Those executives \u2014 in dealmaking mode \u2014 largely focused their keynotes on India\u2019s huge potential to reap the benefits of AI, and its pedigree in building digital public infrastructure that has improved the lives of its 1.4 billion citizens. And they praised India\u2019s vast tech workforce, which they said had a voracious appetite for building with their tools. Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, claimed that advanced AI might lead to 25% annual GDP growth for India, compared to 10% for rich countries. (He conceded those numbers might \u201csound absurd.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n But the executives also warned of massive, and potentially perilous, changes on the horizon. Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, claimed the world might just be \u201conly a couple of years away from early forms of superintelligence,\u201d raising the specter of a global totalitarian regime that he said must be averted by democratizing and decentralizing AI development. Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, said artificial general intelligence (AGI) could be achieved within five years \u2014 an apparent halving of his projected timeline last year, when he said<\/a> he expected AGI within five and 10 years.<\/p>\n The event was the first AI summit to be held in the Global South, and much of the Indian government\u2019s focus was on the developmental and economic opportunities that it said AI is already creating across the subcontinent. Government posters plastered across Delhi declared that \u201cFor India, AI stands for ALL INCLUSIVE.\u201d The event\u2019s tagline \u2014 \u201cWelfare for all, Happiness of all\u201d \u2014 underscored a shift in focus away from just AI risks and toward the ostensible benefits that AI might bring to the world\u2019s poorest.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere would be no credible AI summit in the West that had that tagline,\u201d Rumman Chowdhury, CEO of the AI auditing startup Humane Intelligence, tells TIME. \u201cOne thing I like about this framing is that it\u2019s pushing the narrative to say: it\u2019s credible to talk about happiness, welfare, and flourishing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But for all its focus on inclusion and development, some delegates wondered aloud whether the Indian government was only posturing. Little mention was made of the possibility that India\u2019s vast technology workforce<\/a> might be uniquely vulnerable to dislocation by AI tools like Claude Code and Claude Cowork, and their competitors, that AI CEOs touted during their keynote addresses. \u201cLots of correct words were used to feed an insidious narrative of inevitability,\u201d says Mishi Choudhary, a technology lawyer and civil liberties activist. \u201cI am still waiting for discussions on job eliminations, power infrastructure, and impact on artists.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The hierarchy of the event was also hard to miss, with homeless people reportedly evicted from the road leading to the venue and VIP motorcades shutting down the city with little regard for its residents. The eviction of an Indian university from the summit\u2019s sprawling expo space \u2014 for passing off a Chinese-manufactured robot dog as a domestic innovation \u2014 seemed to underline the feeling that for all India\u2019s talk of AI sovereignty, most AI computing power, data, and talent, remains highly concentrated in the U.S. and China.\u00a0<\/p>\n That uncomfortable truth was on the minds of many delegates who discussed the growing sense of strategic fear among so-called \u201cmiddle powers,\u201d like Europe, Canada, and India, who have been rattled by President Donald Trump\u2019s recent actions on the world stage. After Trump threatened to take Greenland<\/a> by force and called the NATO<\/a> alliance into doubt, many U.S. allies have been forced to rethink their dependence on American security and technology. In Delhi, there was a growing awareness by middle powers of the need to build their own AI capability \u2014 whether in training their own models, designing their own chips, or extricating themselves from the convenient but risky grip of Silicon Valley software giants.\u00a0<\/p>\n