Narendra Modi’s thirst to supercharge economic growth is matched by US desire to inject AI into world’s biggest democracy
India celebrates 80 years of independence from the UK in August 2027. At about that same moment, “early versions of true super intelligence” could emerge, Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, said this week.
It’s a looming coincidence that raised a charged question at the AI Impact summit in Delhi, hosted by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi: can India avoid returning to the status of a vassal state when it imports AI to raise the prospects of its 1.4 billion people?
Modi’s hunger to harness AI’s capability is great. He compared it on Thursday to a turning point that resets the direction of civilisation, such as “when the first sparks were struck from stone”. The most common analogy heard among the thousands of visitors to the summit was the dawn of electricity, but Modi was talking about fire.
His desire to use AI to supercharge Indian economic growth is matched by that of the big US tech companies. OpenAI, Google and Anthropic all played prominent roles at the summit, announcing deals to get ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude AIs into more people’s hands.
As the summit came to a close, Joanna Shields, a former Facebook and Google executive and ex-UK minister for internet safety, warned: “If we have a world where we are accepting models from just the global north, we will lose so much of our cultural diversity, our uniqueness as people, wherever we come from … We don’t want to develop a monoculture based on a handful of models that everybody uses around the world and we lose that richness of who we are, what makes us human.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/20/india-delhi-summit-ai-technology-us-economic-growth