The Fourth Artificial Intelligence (AI) Impact Summit, to be hosted by India in New Delhi from 16–20 February 2026, marks a significant moment in India’s global engagement on emerging technologies. By convening this summit, India is promoting “AI for global good,” advocating responsible AI to address shared challenges in health, education, climate, and justice. The aim is to advance more inclusive, development-focused perspectives in debates often dominated by developed economies.
Equally important is the need to address emerging inequalities in AI adoption and capability. India is trying to look beyond the traditional digital divide and work to prevent an AI divide between the Global South and advanced economies. The summit can be leveraged to promote AI literacy, build human capital, and encourage responsible, human-centric innovation across sectors. It also provides a strategic opportunity for India to showcase its growing AI technological capabilities, attract global investment, and deepen international cooperation, reinforcing its role as a bridge between innovation leadership and inclusive global development.
Over the past decade, artificial intelligence has evolved from being viewed largely as a technical or scientific domain to one with far-reaching implications for governance, national security, economic competitiveness, and business strategy. This shift has prompted governments, international organisations, industry bodies, and civil society groups to engage more actively with questions of AI regulation, risk management, and societal impact.
Reflecting the growing urgency for debate, Global AI Safety Summits have been convened regularly since 2023—beginning at Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom, followed by Seoul in 2024 and Paris in 2025—signalling a collective effort to address the opportunities and risks posed by advanced AI systems at a global level.
The foundations of today’s AI governance discussions can be traced back to the “ethics boom” between 2016 and 2018, when concerns over the social consequences of AI first gained mainstream attention. Subsequently, in May 2019, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) issued the Beijing Consensus on AI and Education, urging the deployment of AI to enhance human capabilities and protect their rights. This was followed the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) emerging as the first intergovernmental body to secure an AI-specific agreement. The Recommendation on Artificial Intelligence (the ‘OECD AI Principles’) of 2019 became a pivotal consensus statement on AI standards from the world’s most advanced economies.
Bletchley Park, United Kingdom (UK), hosted the first global summit on Artificial Intelligence (AI) safety, held on 12 November 2023 with participation form many countries private organisations associated with AI business. India used this to highlight its leadership in global AI governance, emphasising the need for safety, trust and accountability in the development and use of AI. The second summit was held in South Korea on 21–22 May 2024. During the summit, 16 leading tech companies made new voluntary commitments to promote the responsible development of advanced AI systems. From 10 to 11 February 2025, the AI) Action Summit was held in Paris, France. French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi co-chaired this summit. Mr Modi argued that AI is rapidly transforming political, economic, security, and social systems like no previous technology, underscoring the need for coordinated global cooperation to create trusted governance frameworks.
The approaching New Delhi Global AI Impact grounds its agenda within a framework that invokes Sutras and Chakras, making it culturally rooted and globally resonant. The use of these specific terms is not merely rhetorical; it signals an intent to move the global AI debate from technological abstraction toward a language of coherence, alignment, and transformation. Before delving into India’s policy framework, it is important to first understand the analogy of sutras and chakras, which forms the conceptual basis for how India is presenting its agenda. The concepts of sutras and chakras originate from ancient Indian philosophy and spiritual traditions.
The three Sutras namely People, Planet, and Progress; frame AI as a force for inclusive human development, responsible innovation, and sustainable growth. Together, they emphasise people centred and trustworthy AI, alignment of technological progress with environmental stewardship, and the use of AI to advance impartial development through fair access to data and AI capabilities across sectors.
The three Sutras are to be operationalised via seven consistent domains for the focused multilateral collaborations called Chakras. The Chakras govern various dimensions of life and must be harmonised for holistic well-being. Seven Chakras involve Human Capital; Inclusion for Social Empowerment; Safe and Trusted AI; Resilience, Innovation and Efficiency; Science; Democratising AI Resources; and AI for Economic Growth and Social Good.
For the upcoming AI Summit, India must navigate sharply divergent national approaches to AI governance, from strict regulation to innovation-first models, making consensus difficult. The summit’s credibility will also hinge on meaningful engagement with AI industry stakeholders.
Such collaboration is vital to align policy with real-world technological, investment, and growth dynamics. This dual responsibility is reinforced by recent trends in foreign direct investment, which underscore India’s growing centrality to global AI and digital infrastructure strategies. In the recent past, India has witnessed an unprecedented wave of significant investment commitments from major global IT and AI-focused firms, amounting to approximately $67.5 billion in investments from the United States alone. These commitments reflect assurance in India’s market scale, talent pool, and long-term digital ambitions.
Taken together, these investments strengthen India’s leverage in global AI discussions, but they also raise expectations. As both a major host of AI infrastructure and an emerging norm-setter, India will need to balance investor interests with broader public policy goals, including equitable access, workforce readiness, and responsible deployment. This context gives India a strong incentive to shape summit outcomes that are practical, investment-aligned, and development-oriented, while avoiding rigid regulatory postures that could fragment cooperation. Leveraging its unique position as a trusted partner to both advanced and developing economies, India can use the 2026 summit to anchor AI governance debates in economic realities, long-term capacity-building, and shared global interests rather than abstract or ideologically driven positions.
Since the 1st summit, much has changed in AI domain. What began at Bletchley as a narrowly focused discussion on frontier-model safety expanded in Seoul to emphasise the institutionalisation of safety, inclusion, and innovation. The Paris summit further broadened the agenda by engaging with the socio-economic consequences of AI deployment. Building on this trajectory, the forthcoming AI Impact Summit in New Delhi is expected to mark a decisive shift from high-level principles to concrete implementation.
To nurture meaningful common ground among diverse stakeholders, India will need to steer future AI summits towards measurable, time-bound, and outcome-oriented commitments, while resisting any renewed push for purely aspirational or symbolic declarations. A priority should be the promotion of inclusive frameworks that prevent the deepening of global and domestic AI divides. Independently, advancing inclusive technical standards and proportionate safety frameworks will be essential to ensure both innovation and responsible deployment.
Altogether, expectations should be tempered. AI governance is complex, and technological change is unpredictable. Progress on norms will likely be slow, voluntary, and based on evolving consensus rather than binding rules. Recognising these limits is essential to keep efforts credible, flexible, and inclusive.
