India Will Host the Next Global AI Summit. What Mark Will Modi Make?

The AI Summit in Paris dominated the tech policy news cycle over the last fortnight. France, along with India as co-host, led the summit with heads of state and governments, international organization leaders, CEOs from small and large companies, academics, NGO representatives, artists, and civil society members for the third in a series of global discussions on AI policy issues. The summit focused on key themes such as AI for the public interest, the future of work, innovation and culture, trust and openness in AI, and global AI governance.

While the Paris Summit has been covered in some detail on this website and others, India's role as a co-host largely went uncovered. Aside from reporting on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s extremely generic opening address and some customary disinformation about French President Emmanuel Macron ignoring him, how India’s interests were represented in Paris or how they may impact future versions of this forum has not been covered even by the Indian press.

The structure, focus, and even the nomenclature of the Summit clearly telegraphed an intentional and significant shift from safety and regulation toward innovation and the utilization of AI. Macron very briefly touched upon this tension in his remarks, and his characterization of AI as an issue of national sovereignty was a telling harbinger of how national interests and priorities underpinned discussions at the summit.

India actively engaged in the working groups leading up to the summit, which focused on themes including the future of work, security and safety, AI for public benefit, and innovation and culture. Now that India has been announced as the host of the next summit, it is worthwhile looking at how it may shape the discussions.

Modi’s address in Paris was mundane but held some clues on how India may want to position the forum. He stated, "Governance is also about ensuring access for all, especially in the Global South, where capacities are most lacking—be it in computing power, talent, data, or financial resources.” The centering of Global South’s priorities, particularly questions of access, is very much in line with India’s public narrative, as seen during its recent G-20 presidency.

The strategic shift from safety to innovation also suits the Indian regulatory state’s lackadaisical approach to governing the use of AI, even in safety-critical sectors like healthcare and surveillance-centric applications like facial recognition. In the next summit, this shift will allow the Indian government to focus the conversation more on innovation, investments, and access questions while evading scrutiny of its low-rights legal environment ripe for untested technological experiments.

The overwhelming framing of AI conversations in the context of national sovereignty is also a space where Indian policymakers will find themselves comfortable. As I argued here, both public posturing and policy documents that describe India’s digital policymaking increasingly anchor the notion of ‘sovereignty.’ The emotional heft of the word ‘sovereignty’ allows for the centering of national pride in domestic politics, while in parallel, its contested understanding allows a flexible understanding of national interest for an expedient and transactional foreign policy.

An AI Summit in a Global South country with reasonable negotiating abilities, such as India, offers a significant opportunity to reframe the geopolitical conversation around AI. Modi spoke to questions of access for Global South countries, but it will be critical to see what form the ‘access’ conversation takes. A linguistically diverse setting like India also opens the door for more attention to building language models for languages in the South, highlighting the stark differences in the state of the art of natural language processing between English and other languages written in the Latin script, and prominent local languages in Asia, for instance. The other key theme in Modi’s address was building inclusive and open-source AI systems. The Paris Summit was significant because of its clear emphasis on open-source AI development. India and other partners from the Global South would do well to build further on it.

Predictably, in light of the recent release of Deep Seek’s R1 under an open-source license, the AI news cycle in the last month in India has focused on the perceived failures of AI development in India compared to China. On cue, the India AI Mission called for proposals inviting bids to build foundational AI models using Indian datasets.

Aside from the potential for concrete investments and deal-making, the Modi government pursues opportunities to preside over international fora as prestige projects. As the strongman leader of the world’s largest democracy, hosting convenings with global participation allows Modi and his government to showcase large national technological projects and initiatives such as Aadhaar and Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). During its G20 presidency, the Indian government made a coordinated effort, with active support from industry and international organizations like UNDP, the World Bank, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to position its DPI initiatives as exemplar projects, so much so that its coverage during the G20 events resembled hagiographic tributes rather than critical analysis. Modi’s reference to DPI in his Paris address suggests that this trend will continue during its hosting of the AI Summit as well.