The India AI Impact Summit, held in New Delhi in February 2026, marked the first major global AI convening hosted in the Global South, attracting over 600,000 participants including policymakers, practitioners, and civil society actors. The summit aimed to transform the concept of “AI for All” from a slogan into actionable governance, emphasizing the need for coordinated efforts across governments, research institutions, and civil society to shape AI and digital infrastructure in ways that serve the public interest.
GSI participated in the summit through its joint initiative with the Project Liberty Institute (PLI) on digital infrastructure governance. Representatives Vidisha Mishra and Mateo Rodriguez shared preliminary findings from their research project, “Building Digital Infrastructure for the AI Era: Insights from Middle Power States,” which included interviews with senior policymakers from over a dozen middle power countries. The research highlighted that these states are moving beyond simple digital service deployment to actively shaping markets and embedding pro-human governance values into the architecture of digital infrastructure.
GSI’s engagement at the summit included three major sessions. The first, “Building Trust: Digital Infrastructure Fit for the AI Era,” focused on embedding democratic principles, transparency, accountability, and openness into AI infrastructure from the ground up. The second, a multi-stakeholder roundtable on “Collective AI Governance,” explored ways to mitigate governance fragmentation through regional regulatory sandboxes or “governance labs” for piloting and refining policy approaches before scaling them globally. The final session, “Steering DPI & AI Innovation Towards Public Value Maximization,” emphasized the role of governments as active stewards of the digital commons, recommending the strategic use of public procurement to incentivize safe, trustworthy, and open-source AI solutions.
From these engagements, GSI distilled four strategic takeaways. First, robust digital infrastructure is foundational for effective AI governance, allowing states to avoid technological dependency and maintain strategic optionality. Second, a pro-human AI stack must prioritize transparency, citizen agency, and data empowerment to prevent extractive practices common in the platform-era internet. Third, the focus should shift from high-level declarations to operational delivery, including measurable assurance mechanisms like cross-border auditing and certification. Fourth, legitimacy in international governance requires substantial investment in technical capacity building, ensuring regulators, especially in the Global South, can effectively implement and oversee AI frameworks.
Looking ahead to the 2027 AI Summit in Switzerland, GSI emphasizes that AI governance cannot be dictated by a small set of countries or corporations. By combining multilateral engagement with evidence-based research, GSI and its partners aim to foster a digital ecosystem that expands opportunities for underserved populations, promotes competition, safeguards public interest, and ensures that humans remain at the center of technological development.
