There is a difference between being invited to someone else’s table and setting your own. For years, India watched the world’s biggest AI conversations happen in San Francisco, Beijing, and London. Last week, that changed. The world came to Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. India was not a guest. India was the host.
That is not a small thing. That is history.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi walked onto that stage — on Indian soil — and said something the richest nations in the room did not want to hear: Artificial Intelligence must belong to everyone, not just to the powerful few. When that line is spoken in Washington, it sounds like a complaint. When it is spoken in New Delhi, at a summit India organised and India invited the world to, it sounds like a demand.
But here is the uncomfortable question India must now answer honestly — did the world actually listen?
Let us first understand what AI really is, for those who are new to this conversation. Artificial Intelligence is technology that thinks, learns, and makes decisions — almost like a human brain, but inside a computer. It is already deciding what news appears on your phone, how hospitals detect diseases, how banks approve loans, and how farmers receive weather warnings. Now imagine if only two countries — America and China — controlled all of this. That is exactly the situation the world is in today, and that is precisely what India tried to change by hosting this summit.
Modi’s government used the platform boldly. India called upon giants like OpenAI and Google to make their AI models “open source” — meaning, to share their technology freely so that countries like India, Nigeria, or Brazil can use it to solve their own problems in education, healthcare, and farming. This was not a polite request whispered from the sidelines. This was India, at its own summit, speaking for the entire developing world.
America did not agree. As reported by the Financial Times, Michael Kratsios, the White House’s top science and technology official, told the gathering that the United States completely rejects the idea of global rules to govern AI. He argued that heavy regulations would choke the technology. In other words, America said — we will build AI our way, and the rest of the world can manage.
On Indian soil. At India’s summit. That was America’s answer.
That is a hard truth India must sit with for a while.
The summit did bring genuine wins. India received investment commitments worth a staggering $227 billion, mostly for building data centres. Sarvam AI, a bright young start-up from Bengaluru, launched its own large language model — an AI system built to help ordinary Indians with everyday problems, in Indian languages. TCS and Infosys have partnered with OpenAI and Anthropic to bring AI into businesses worldwide. And OpenAI’s Sam Altman said India is the fastest-growing market for Codex, their popular coding tool. That is not flattery. That is recognition of a real, rising market.
But India must be brutally honest with itself here. We do not yet have enough powerful computers and advanced chips to compete with the top AI nations. James Manyika, a senior leader at Alphabet — Google’s parent company — told the Financial Times clearly that making AI accessible to the developing world is extremely difficult right now because countries in the Global South simply lack the digital backbone: strong internet, massive data centres, and advanced chips. The gap is widest exactly where India stands.
That gap cannot be filled with ambition alone.
The summit also had its awkward moments. Heavy traffic jams outside the venue. Long queues that embarrassed the organisers. Big names like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates cancelled at the last minute. And then there was that photograph.
Modi, ever the gracious host, asked the group of world leaders and tech giants gathered on Indian soil to hold their neighbour’s hand and raise it in celebration. Most followed. Almost everyone joined. But Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic — fierce business rivals standing right next to each other — quietly refused to join hands.
Think about that image for a moment. The world came to Bharat Mandapam. India set the stage, arranged the chairs, and wrote the agenda. And yet, on that very stage, global tech giants were still playing entirely by their own rules — smiling for the cameras but refusing even a symbolic gesture of unity when their host asked for one.
In one photograph, the entire complicated truth of modern AI politics was captured.
India must learn the right lesson from all of this. The lesson is not that we failed. The lesson is that hosting the world is only the first step. To truly shape the future AI, India must now invest aggressively in computing power, homegrown chips, original research, and Indian-language AI that works in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi, and Bengali.
India has earned a seat at the table. Now it must build the strength to write the rules.
(Girish Linganna is an award-winning science communicator and a Defence, Aerospace & Geopolitical Analyst. He is the Managing Director of ADD Engineering Components India Pvt. Ltd., a subsidiary of ADD Engineering GmbH, Germany.)
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: ZEE News
