India AI Impact Summit 2026 draws US, China and top AI CEOs

India is positioning itself not just as an AI adopter, but as a convening power in global AI governance. By hosting a week‑long India AI Impact Summit in early 2026 and drawing in leaders from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Adobe, Salesforce, Qualcomm, Nvidia and more, New Delhi is turning its ‘AI for All’ slogan into a diplomatic asset. The decision to formally invite China for the first time—and to court both US Big Tech and Global South governments—signals that India wants to be the place where competing AI blocs still sit at the same table.([livemint.com](https://www.livemint.com/technology/india-china-ai-impact-summit-artificial-intelligence-regulation-11767021427110.html))

For the race to AGI, this matters because it’s one of the few forums explicitly framed around inclusion, access to compute and “democratising AI resources,” not just safety rhetoric. If the summit produces even a soft consensus on topics like cross‑border model evaluation, shared safety baselines, or compute access for developing countries, it could subtly reshape where next‑generation models are trained and how their benefits are distributed. At the same time, India is showcasing its own foundational models and infrastructure, using diplomacy to amplify its bid to be a third pole alongside US‑ and China‑centric ecosystems.([money.rediff.com](https://money.rediff.com/news/market/india-ai-impact-summit-global-leaders-to-attend/39398420251229))

Whether this leads to binding rules or mostly photo ops is still an open question. But in a field increasingly steered by a handful of frontier labs, a large democracy trying to broker norms between Washington, Beijing and the Global South is a nontrivial new factor.