Tech billionaires fly in for Delhi AI expo as Modi pushes to lead AI (artificial intelligence) in the south

Silicon Valley tech billionaires will land in Delhi this week for an AI summit hosted by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modiwhere leaders of the global south will vie for control of the rapidly developing technology.

At the week-long AI Impact Summit, attended by thousands of tech executives, government officials and AI security experts, trillion-dollar tech companies will rub shoulders with leaders from countries like Kenya and Indonesia, where average wages fall well below $1,000 a month.

In the midst of an effort to speed up AI adoption around the world, 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 each push for greater adoption of AI. Sunak has taken jobs at Microsoft and Anthropic, and Osborne is leading OpenAI’s effort to deepen and expand the use of ChatGPT beyond its existing 800 million users.

Meanwhile, Modi, who will address the summit on Thursday, is positioning India as the AI ​​hub for South Asia and Africa. On the agenda will be AI’s potential to transform agriculture, water supplies and public health. Governments in Kenya, Senegal, Mauritius, Togo, Indonesia and Egypt will send ministers.

Modi’s enthusiasm for AI has a darker side, civil liberties campaigners say. Last week they raised serious concerns about India deploying AI to increase state surveillance, discriminate against minorities and sway elections. But Modi this week spoke of “harnessing artificial intelligence for human-centered progress” and India gave the summit the direction: “Welfare for all, happiness for all.”

Summit observers are talking about a battle between a new kind of AI colonialism of the US tech firms and an alternative “techno-Gandhism”, in which AI is used for social justice and to benefit marginalized people. After global AI summits in the UK, Korea and France, the Delhi meeting is the first to be held in the global south.

Indian commentators say the test of AI’s value is not in its technical sophistication, but whether it can improve the lives of people living in some of the harshest conditions in the global south. By contrast, US AI companies are jockeying for supremacy, competing with each other and China, deploying AI for procurement, personal companionship and agency systems that can reduce corporate labor costs by making white-collar work redundant.

If an arbitrator is needed between the two sides, António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, will speak in Delhi. This week he said it would be “totally unacceptable that AI would be a prerogative of the most developed countries or a division only between two superpowers.”

India’s AI Impact Summit is the fourth iteration of the event, which Sunak launched in 2023 at Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom, with a focus on international coordination to prevent catastrophic risks from the most advanced AI models. Summits followed in Seoul in 2024 and Paris in 2025, where US Vice President JD Vance appeared to dismiss the White House’s interest in security, saying: “The AI ​​future will not be won by hand-wringing about security; it will be won by building.”

Security is back on the agenda, with Yoshua Bengio, one of the “godfathers” of AI, on hand to reiterate his fears about the risk of powerful AI systems enabling cyber and bioweapon attacks.

“The capabilities of AI have continued to advance, and while mitigation and risk management of AI has also advanced (it has), not as quickly,” he said Tuesday. “So it becomes urgent that leaders of this world understand where we may be going and it needs their attention and intervention as soon as possible.”

Among those working at the summit to make sure AI stays safe will be Nicolas Miaihle, co-founder of the AI-Safety Connect group, who noted that the summit is taking place in the shadow of AI-enabled warfare in Ukraine and the Middle East.

“The existential risks aren’t going anywhere,” the Guardian said. “When Rishi Sunak started this, the race wasn’t as fierce. The trillions are pouring in, but we’re a long way from securing some of these models. It’s deep for democracy, deep for the mental health of our children, and deep for warfare.”

But the Trump administration is continuing its policy of refusing to bind American AI companies with red tape. The White House is not expected to send a high-level representative to Delhi, with Sriram Krishnan, its senior AI policy adviser, the highest-ranking speaker listed in the program.

“Given where we are with the US administration, it’s pretty unlikely that you’re going to have a massive breakthrough on any consensus on what a regulatory framework will look like,” said a senior AI company source.

Companies like Google is focused on using AI in education in India, where large language models’ ability to function in many of the country’s dozens of languages ​​is an advantage.

“(There’s) a big focus on access and adoption, how do you make sure the technology is as widely available as possible,” said Owen Larter, head of frontier AI policy and public affairs at Google DeepMind. “We’re excited about the education front in India. It’s a remarkable story of incredibly intense adoption. About 90% of teachers and students already using AI in their learning. We had a big promotional program where 2 million students got free access to our pro subscription.”

Google’s investments in India include spending $15 billion, in partnership with the conglomerate of Gautam Adani, one of India’s richest billionaires, on a gigawatt-scale AI data center in the coastal city of Visakhapatnam, in Andhra Pradesh, with undersea cables connecting to other parts of the world.