India will push efforts to widen access to artificial intelligence and seek international agreement on a “global AI commons” at a summit this week, according to the government official overseeing the event.
Abhishek Singh, chief executive of India’s AI mission, said “democratising AI access to the global south” and rolling out technology for social ends such as education, health and agriculture, would be India’s priority as host of the Global AI Impact Summit in New Delhi from Monday.
“The global AI commons means creating a repository of use cases for AI in key sectors, which can then be shared,” Singh said.
India wanted to make AI applications “interoperable and available to the global community to ensure they are diffused widely and adopted at scale”, he said.
More than 20 heads of state and government, including France’s Emmanuel Macron and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, along with representatives of more than 60 other countries, will convene in New Delhi, along with AI business leaders and investors.
The meeting will give India, the world’s most populous country, a global platform to try to steer discussion on using and regulating AI and to showcase its record on leveraging technology for development.
“Frontier AI is being built, trained and controlled by a handful of firms and states, mostly in the US and China,” said Jibu Elias, an AI researcher and governance expert who has worked with the Indian government.
“So for India and the global south, the ‘commons’ is a way to argue that foundational AI capabilities, data sets, standards and safety norms should not quietly become private infrastructure controlled by a few companies.”
When Narendra Modi’s government hosted the G20 in 2023, it used the event to highlight its push to make digital public infrastructure accessible to hundreds of millions of people. It has linked citizens into a state-supervised platform for public services and online payments, nicknamed the “India Stack”. Several other countries have studied India’s digital push or adopted aspects of its model.
“There’s a lot of mistrust across the world when it comes to AI,” Singh said. “So given that we had been playing this role of being trusted by multiple partners in using technology for transformational changes, we do believe we have the ability to bring consensus and . . . bring together the whole world to try to contribute to this.”
The UK hosted the first AI summit in 2023 and focused on AI safety and extreme risks. When Macron hosted it last year, he used it to trumpet big investments in France’s tech sector.
The Modi government has been assertive in regulating tech, particularly perceived online harm, and recently issued a legal notice to Elon Musk’s X after its Grok chatbot was found to be generating sexually explicit AI-generated images.
But despite being the home of leading IT companies such as Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services, the country has not been a leader in developing AI large language models or profiting from the technology’s rollout.
The Modi government has criticised the country’s $300bn IT industry for not investing in product innovation. India is, however, positioning itself as a site for data centres. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon last year announced plans to invest more than $50bn for AI investment in the country.
