India AI Impact Summit 2026 positions Global South at center of AI governance

By hosting the AI Impact Summit, India is moving from being primarily a consumer and outsourcing hub for AI to a convening power in global AI governance. Framing the summit explicitly around ‘impact’ and ‘AI for Humanity’ signals a shift away from narrow safety summits toward forums that link governance to development outcomes, inclusion and public‑sector deployment at scale. That is highly relevant in a country where AI is seen as an infrastructure layer for welfare delivery, payments, agriculture and education.

For the AGI race, this matters on two fronts. First, it gives the Global South more voice in setting norms for how advanced systems should be evaluated, deployed and shared. Countries like India will be key demand centers for inference and agentic applications, and their preferences around open models, localization and affordability will influence which technical paradigms win. Second, it creates a parallel track of legitimacy to Western safety summits: frontier labs will now need to satisfy both a safety‑heavy narrative (Bletchley, Seoul, Paris) and an impact‑heavy one (Delhi). That could either slow uncoordinated roll‑out of AGI‑like systems or, if handled well, accelerate deployment of socially useful capabilities while keeping the highest‑risk use cases fenced off.