Silicon Valley tech billionaires will land in Delhi this week for an AI summit hosted by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, where leaders of the global south will wrestle for control over the fast-developing technology.

During the week-long AI Impact Summit, attended by thousands of tech executives, government officials and AI safety experts, tech companies valued at trillions of dollars will rub along with leaders of countries such as Kenya and Indonesia, where average wages dip well below $1,000 a month.

Amid a push to speed up AI adoption across the globe, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, the heads of Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, will all be there. Rishi Sunak and George Osborne, a former British prime minister and a former chancellor, will each be pushing for greater adoption of AI. Sunak has taken jobs for Microsoft and Anthropic and Osborne leads OpenAI’s push to deepen and widen the use of ChatGPT beyond its existing 800 million users.

Meanwhile Modi, who will address the summit on Thursday, is positioning India as the AI hub for south Asia and Africa. On the agenda will be AI’s potential to transform agriculture, water supplies and public health. Governments in Kenya, Senegal, Mauritius, Togo, Indonesia and Egypt will send ministers.

Modi’s enthusiasm for AI has a darker side, civil liberties campaigners say. Last week they raised serious concerns about India deploying AI to increase state surveillance, discriminate against minorities and sway elections. But Modi this week spoke of “harnessing artificial intelligence for human-centric progress” and India has given the summit the strapline: “Welfare for all, happiness for all.”

Summit observers talk of a battle between a new kind of AI colonialism from the US tech firms and an alternative “techno-Gandhism”, in which AI is used for social justice and to benefit marginalised people. After global AI summits in the UK, Korea and France, the Delhi meeting is the first to be held in the global south.

Indian commentators say the test of AI’s value is not in its technical sophistication but whether it can improve the lives of people living in some of the toughest circumstances in the global south. By contrast, US AI companies are racing for supremacy, competing with each other and China, and rolling out AI for shopping, personal companionship and agentic systems that could slash corporate labour costs by making white-collar jobs redundant.

If a referee between the two sides is needed, António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, will speak in Delhi. This week he said it would be “totally unacceptable that AI would be just a privilege of the most developed countries or a division only between two superpowers”.

India’s AI Impact Summit is the fourth iteration of the event, which Sunak launched in 2023 at Bletchley Park in the UK, with a focus on international coordination to prevent catastrophic risks from the most advanced AI models. Summits followed in Seoul in 2024 and Paris in 2025, where the US vice-president, JD Vance, appeared to abandon the White House’s interest in safety saying: “The AI future will not be won by hand-wringing about safety; it will be won by building.”

Safety is once again on the agenda, with Yoshua Bengio, one of the “godfathers” of AI, on hand to repeat his fears about the risk of powerful AI systems enabling cyber- and bioweapons attacks.

“The capabilities of AI have continued to advance, and although mitigation and risk management of AI has also progressed [it has happened] not as quickly,” he said on Tuesday. “So it becomes urgent that leaders of this world understand where we could be going and it needs their attention and intervention as soon as possible.”

One of those working at the summit to make sure AI remains safe will be Nicolas Miaihle, co-founder of the AI Safety Connect group, who noted that the summit was taking place in the shadow of AI-enabled warfare in Ukraine and the Middle East.

“The existential risks are not going anywhere,” he told the Guardian. “When Rishi Sunak started this, the race was not raging as hard. The trillions are pouring in but we are very far away from securing these models. This is profound for democracy, profound for the mental health of our kids and profound for warfare.”

But the Trump administration continues its policy of refusing to bind US AI companies with red tape. The White House is not expected to send a high-level representative to Delhi, with Sriram Krishnan, its senior AI policy adviser, the highest-ranked speaker listed in the programme.

“Given where we are with the US administration it’s pretty unlikely you’re going to have a massive breakthrough on any consensus on what a regulatory framework will look like,” said one senior AI company source.

Companies such as Google are focused on the use of AI in education in India, where large language models’ ability to function in many of the country’s dozens of languages is an advantage.

“[There’s] a big focus on access and adoption, how can you make sure that the technology is available as broadly as possible,” said Owen Larter, head of frontier AI policy and public affairs at Google DeepMind. “We’re excited on the education front in India. It’s a remarkable story of an incredibly intense adoption. About 90% of teachers and students already using AI in their learning. We’ve had a big promotional programme where 2 million students have access to our pro subscription for free.”

Google’s investments in India include a $15bn spend, in partnership with the conglomerate of Gautam Adani, one of India’s richest billionaires, on an gigawatt-scale AI datacentre hub in the coastal city of Visakhapatnam, in Andhra Pradesh, with subsea cables connecting to other parts of the world.