India’s AI summit draws global leaders, big pledges and some chaos

As the United States and China battle to dominate artificial intelligence, India this week tried to emphasize that there are other paths to dealing with the rise of silicon.

Billed as the first high-level AI gathering to be held in the Global South, the India AI Impact Summit gave the world’s most populous country a stage to promote itself as a global AI player, expanding the AI ​​conversation to include countries in Latin America, Africa and beyond.

“In the long term, it is good for the world that AI is not just seen as a race between the United States and China, and I think India is currently the actor who is most confidently saying: ‘We reject this dynamic,’” said Jakob Mökander, director of science and technology policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

As the event’s “impact” branding suggests, the summit highlighted how countries can adopt and adapt increasingly powerful AI systems to their own needs and sectors.

“Each country will want to chart its own AI destiny,” Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and head of the U.S. delegation to the summit, told NBC News. “They each have unique characteristics about their culture, their language, their traditions, how they want to use AI.”

As part of the event, Kratsios announced a series of initiatives aimed at increasing America’s global commitment to AI, including a Peace Corps program focused on AI and new World Bank funding to allow countries to purchase AI systems.

The five-day summit in New Delhi, hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, opened with its share of setbacks. With more than 250,000 registered attendees, the summit was plagued earlier this week by complaints about overcrowding, long lines, visa issues and traffic disruptions, and there were some major no-shows, including a last-minute cancellation from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who was questioned about his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, also withdrew hours before his keynote speech on Thursday, saying in a statement that he wanted to “ensure that the focus remains on the key priorities of the AI ​​Summit.”

Later in the day, U.S. rivals Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic held hands with people on either side, but not each other in what was meant to be a show of unity with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other tech executives.

Earlier in the week, an Indian university was reportedly asked to leave the summit after a staff member passed off a robotic dog developed by Chinese company Unitree as one developed by the university.

“The Modi government has made India the laughing stock of the world when it comes to AI,” the opposition Congress party said in an article on X, noting that India’s information technology minister shared the erroneous report and then deleted it.

But the summit still brought some victories for India, including two of the largest conglomerates, Reliance and Adani, pledging a combined $210 billion investment in domestic AI and data infrastructure (compared to the more than $630 billion U.S. tech giants are expected to spend this year). OpenAI signed a partnership deal with Mumbai-based Tata Group, while Anthropic announced one with Infosys and opened an office in its hometown Bangalore.

“The solutions presented here – in the areas of agriculture, security, assistance for people with disabilities and meeting the needs of multilingual populations – are powerful examples of the strength of Made in India and India’s innovation capabilities,” Modi said in a speech on Thursday.

Attendees said that while this year’s summit was accessible to many more people than previous ones, they noted that there were fewer top government and business leaders actually making policy. The summit brought together at least 20 heads of state and government, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, as well as technology executives including Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and Microsoft President Brad Smith.

The world’s two biggest AI powers, the United States and China, did not send heads of state. For China, which has contentious but warm relations with India, the summit coincided with the Lunar New Year, the country’s biggest holiday.

As the highest-ranking U.S. official at the event, the White House’s Kratsios stressed the need for countries to avoid strict technocratic oversight of AI, echoing Vice President JD Vance’s remarks at last year’s meeting in Paris.

“AI governance must focus on the particular needs and interests of certain people and must therefore be local,” Kratsios said in a speech on Friday. “AI adoption cannot lead to a better future if it is subject to bureaucracies and centralized control.”

As part of his speech on Friday, Kratsios announced the National Champions Initiative, which aims to help AI-related companies from partner countries create closer ties with U.S. AI companies.

“When we say we’re trying to export the American AI stack, that doesn’t mean it’s 100% American content and there’s nothing else in it,” Kratsios told NBC News. “There are so many countries around the world that have great national AI champions themselves and are excelling at certain levels of the AI ​​stack.”

The Trump administration is eager to supplant China, which has long courted international partners in the field of AI. On Friday, India officially joined Pax Silica, a US-led international coalition launched in December aimed at building a resilient supply chain for essential minerals.

Competition between the United States and China has countries like India worried about being caught in the middle. Sriram Krishnan, senior AI policy adviser at the White House, sparked some backlash when he said this week that America’s AI stack should be the “bedrock” on which its allies rely.

Critics have said India should build its own fundamental AI models to avoid being too dependent on the United States. Although India lags far behind the United States and China, which together control about 85% of global AI computing power, its digital public infrastructure – such as internet connectivity, digital payments and digital identification – is “better than most developed countries”, said Mökander, of the Tony Blair Institute.

“They’re very proud of it, because it’s sort of a third way between open-source Chinese AI and closed-source American AI,” he said.

The series of global AI summits has evolved significantly since the first was held in Bletchley Park, England, in 2023, attended by a small group of government and business leaders. While the first summit focused primarily on the existential risks of AI at borders, this year’s event “takes a very broad view of what security means,” said Amlan Mohanty, a researcher at Carnegie India and government adviser on AI policy issues.

“It’s no longer just about malicious use or cybersecurity risks or national security risks,” he said. “It’s about how can we ensure that we have enough data on economic transformation, employment and the impact on job transitions to be able to make useful policy changes?

Mohanty said this thinking was reflected in two voluntary commitments made at the summit: one on using data to assess the economic impact of AI, and the other on improving the performance of AI models in different languages ​​and cultural contexts.

“Understanding what works, what doesn’t, and who benefits is critical so that AI applications can be designed to maximize social benefits and mitigate unintended harm,” said Iqbal Dhaliwal, global executive director of the association. Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT.

“The majority of the world’s population lives in the Global South,” Dhaliwal said in emailed comments, noting that India accounts for one-sixth of the world’s population. “Hosting the Summit here helped focus the conversation on the issues and use cases that will impact these billions of people. »