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As artificial intelligence reshapes national and global political economies, the societies are grappling with the digital profound impact on creativity, governance, healthcare, misinformation, and the future of work. In February-2025, in Paris, the global digital community leaders at annual AI summit wanted to make some universal regulations; this year, the AI’s impact summit in New Delhi revealed still persisting controversies. Hence, many leaders just drafted a very weak statement identifying “common denominators” without strict obligations.
Background
This year, the world and technology leaders have been gathering in India for the annual global AI summit, which aimed to establish a unified framework for artificial intelligence (AI) governance and international cooperation.
But given that the last year’s AI summit in Paris highlighted fragmentation amongst countries in how the technology should be regulated to keep the technology safe, it is still generally unclear what, if anything, “can be pledged”.
The Paris AI-Action Summit in 2025, approved a declaration that outlined policies for ensuring AI is “open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy”. Some 60 countries signed the declaration but not the United Kingdom and/or the United States. The UK cited national security concerns as its reason while the US did not specify exactly why it did not sign the doctrine but the country’s vice president, JD Vance, warned delegates in Paris that “too much regulation would stifle innovation”. To a certain degree, this statement forced the EU-wide governance to initiate some dramatic measures to “simplify” regulatory burden.
On the Paris-2025 AI summit in: https://parispeaceforum.org/projects-ai-action-summit/
The AI’s annual summits before the Paris-2025 (held in the United Kingdom and in South Korea) were focused more on the potential harms and risks of AI models. However, France in 2025, for example, made its intentions clear that it was “open for business”.
The Paris summit resembled more of a tech fair or even festival atmosphere with many fancy corporate side events and even the US vice-president, closing the first day at the Grand Palais, which followed French President Emmanuel Macron telling the audience “I have a good friend in the other part of the ocean saying ‘drill, baby, drill’,” referring to his US counterpart.
Source: https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/02/14/devoid-of-any-meaning-why-experts-call-the-paris-ai-action-summit-a-missed-opportunity
Organizational structure
Around 20 national leaders attended the event, e.g. French President Emmanuel Macron, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, and Brazil’s President Lula da Silva among others. There were about 45 ministerial-level delegations including: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, Microsoft President Brad Smith and the “French AI’s godfather”, Yann LeCun, etc. Besides, there were present some 250,000 digital scientists, researchers and AI companies’ representatives.
Expectations for the present-2026 summit were different: keeping the lead in eliminating the risks of AI, and that of the digital-economic transitions that have been approaching fast!
The Summit was organised in three sections on AI’s influence on: a) people, b) planet and 3) further progress (the latter defined various states and India’s approaches to global cooperation on AI). Most interesting is how “planet” is addressed, given the huge energy required to run large language models (LLMs). The summit intended to adopt “a common pledge”, but not a binding global digital agreement.
Important was, that the summit in February 2026 didn’t frame innovation and regulation as opposing forces: “the real task was to align them, ensuring that ambition is met with accountability”, said Gilroy Matthew, chief operating officer at US digital transformation company UST.
Reference to: https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/02/16/indias-global-ai-summit-puts-international-governance-to-the-test
India’s role
India, as one of the world’s most populous nation, has a massive digital startup’s community and one of the fastest-growing digital/AI markets, the fact that make the summit a vital digital progressive revelation for the so-called “global South”. “This event has been a further proof that our country is progressing rapidly in the field of science and technology. It shows the capability of our country’s youth.” India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote on the social media platform X.
“India’s global position enables it to act as a bridge between developing and developed nations, championing a third way for AI – one that prioritises practical impact over existential risk, showing how AI can address challenges in healthcare, education and other public services,” he told Euronews Next.
Regrets, disappointments and perspectives
As to the previous Paris AI Action Summit in 2025, the experts were almost unanimous in calling it a ‘missed opportunity’; this time, there were no surprise. For example, Emmanuel Macron voice his plea for “protecting against digital abuse”, and urged for more safeguards following Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot being used to generate deepfake images of sexualized women and children without consent. He also said that AI should not be just in the hands of a few powerful AI companies: “AI has become a major field of strategic competition, and big tech got even bigger.”
More on Grok and X in: https://www.integrin.dk/2026/01/28/contemporary-issues-in-the-eu-digital-transition-grok-x/
President Macron also hit back at criticisms that Europe over-regulates AI to its detriment: “Opposite to what some misinformed friends have been saying, Europe is not blindly focused on regulation. Europe is a space for innovation and investment, but it is a safe space, and safe spaces win in the long run.”
He also said that both Paris in 2025 and New Delhi in 2026 shared a common vision of “sovereign AI,” which he described as AI developed and governed in a way that protects the planet while fostering inclusive economic growth.
Source: https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/02/19/from-macron-to-altman-what-are-world-and-tech-leaders-saying-at-the-india-ai-summit?
India’s Prime Minister highlighted the host country’s culture and heritage, saying, “India is the land of Buddha, and Lord Buddha said, ‘right action comes from right understanding”. Therefore, it is very important that leaders together create a roadmap that shows the true impact of AI.
India’s direction regarding AI is clear, he added, saying the technology is “a shared resource for the benefit of all humanity”.
“Together, we must create an AI future that advances innovation, strengthens inclusion, and moves forward by incorporating human values. When technology and human trust go hand in hand, the true impact of AI will be visible on the world. We must resolve that AI is used for the global common good. We are entering an era where humans and intelligence systems co-create, co-work and co-evolve,” he added.
Experts’ opinion
Digital gurus, voice other AI’s aspects: thus, OpenAI’s CEO and co-founder Sam Altman said that the world should “urgently” regulate AI: “democratisation of AI is the best way to ensure humanity flourishes, but centralising the tech in one company or country could lead to ruins”, he said. However, he was cautious, saying that “we should need some regulation or safeguards”, as the humanity always did with other powerful technologies.
Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei said that AI has been on a growth and exponential path for the last 10 years; he warned that machines out-performing humans “might be only years away” and described the digital future with a number of “country-geniuses in data canters”, as well as a set of AI agents that were more capable than most humans, “and could coordinate at superhuman speed.”
He also noted that “while AI could cure disease and lift millions out of poverty, it may also pose serious risks, such as misuse and job disruption”. However, he added, that “India has an absolutely central role to play in these questions and challenges, both on the side of the opportunities and on the side of the risks”.
More on AI in: https://www.euronews.com/tag/artificial-intelligence
Note. Still, the “force-concentration” in the digital world is both “the US-like” and personal: for the former, the global digital “magnificent-seven” is grounded mostly in the US (Microsoft and Amazon, Apple and Meta, Invidia, Alphabet and Tesla), for the latter, e.g. M. Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
nice topic