About 15 to 20 heads of state are expected to attend the summit on the impact of artificial intelligence. Around 100,000 participants are expected at the main event in February. Photo: impact.indiaai.gov.in
The Union Government is continuing to organize a summit on the impact of artificial intelligence on a scale comparable to the G20 summit in 2023, according to the estimated number of participants and the number of ongoing and planned “pre-summit” events.
Like the much-hyped G20 multilateral event in 2023, this event will be attended by around 15 to 20 heads of state. Around 100,000 participants are expected at the main event in February, IT Minister S Krishnan said at a briefing on Monday (Dec 29, 2025).
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While Mr Krishnan did not mention the G20, he outlined that the annual AI summits – a multilateral arrangement that started from Bletchley Park in the UK in 2023 to Seoul the following year and Paris in 2025 (with India taking the reins for 2026) – had seen increasing participation. The officials sought to better position India on the world stage on AI-related issues with a series of pre-summit events in India and abroad.
“At the initial summit we had about 27 countries participating, including India, and eventually 28 countries signed the declaration at Bletchley Park. By the time we got to France, there were over 100 countries participating in various forms,” Mr Krishnan said.
Top researchers and business leaders from AI firms including Anthropic and Google Deepmind will also attend the event, with other leading players tentatively confirmed.
“And we expect that number to improve in February as there is more and more interest as time goes on,” Mr Krishnan said. Several new countries that are part of the Global South will join this edition, he added. The government has not yet confirmed who it will be.
China will be invited, as it has been since the UK’s inaugural summit and those that followed. Apart from France, it is not clear which countries will be represented at the head of state level, although Mr Krishnan said over a dozen heads of state had already confirmed their participation.
The range of pre-summit events is remarkable in itself – over the past few weeks, several tech-themed events hosted by industry associations and private firms, both global and domestic, have been branded ahead of the summit. More than 300 such events have taken place in India and around the world, Mr. Krishnan said.
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India’s priorities
The event is set to cover several topics, with working groups addressing issues including AI and its impact on work, trust and security protocols for AI models, and the use of AI in specific industries.
Mr Krishnan outlined India’s priorities for the summit – one of which was that AI should not be concentrated in just a few geographies or companies. “It needs to be made more widely available as a horizontal technology to really support the development of humanity as a whole and ensure that all countries around the world have access to the various elements of AI; that includes infrastructure, whether it’s computational, whether it’s (large-language) models, whether it’s data … all of that plus possible applications,” he said.
Second, Mr. Krishnan said, it promotes a governance framework for AI that balances the prudence of markets that are heavily regulated and those that are not. “We need to approach AI with a positive mindset as a technology that we can use in a big way,” said Mr. Krishnan.
“A lot of people have talked about the potential downsides. The key message we want to get across in this overall framework is how we protect against downsides while leveraging AI, and the inclusion of the Global South in particular, led in a sense by India, is a very important element of what we’re trying to do,” the IT minister said.
Published – 29 Dec 2025 22:14 IST
