From left: India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, with the chief executives of OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Anthropic, Dario Amodei, at the AI Impact summit in Delhi. From left: India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, with the chief executives of OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Anthropic, Dario Amodei, at the AI Impact summit in Delhi. AI hit: India hungry to harness US tech giants' technology at Delhi summit Narendra Modi's thirst to supercharge economic growth is matched by US desire to inject AI into world's biggest democracy I ndia 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.

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi takes a group photo with AI company leaders at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on Feb. 19, 2026. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi takes a group photo with AI company leaders at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on Feb. 19, 2026. The world's largest-ever AI summit took place in India this week, with hundreds of thousands of people, including world leaders and CEOs of AI companies, descending upon New Delhi for five days. It was the fourth in a series of summits that were initially designed as a place for governments to coordinate global action in the face of threats from advanced AI. But the India summit, like one in Paris before it, functioned more as a trade fair and an advertisement for the host nation's AI prowess than a venue for meaningful international diplomacy.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi takes a group photo with leaders of artificial intelligence companies at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on Thursday. But analysts said the country was unlikely to have a "DeepSeek moment" -- the sort of boom China had last year with a high-performance, low-cost chatbot -- any time soon. Still, building custom AI tools could bring benefits to the world's most populous nation. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right. With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories.

Epstein's shadow: Why Bill Gates pulled out of Modi's AI summit Microsoft founder Bill Gates has cancelled his keynote speech at India's flagship AI summit just hours before he was due to take the stage on Thursday. Gates, who has faced renewed scrutiny over his past ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, withdrew to "ensure the focus remains on the AI Summit's key priorities", the Gates Foundation said in a statement. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi had billed the summit as an opportunity for India to shape the future of AI, drawing high-profile attendees, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Instead, it has been dogged by controversy, from Gates's abrupt exit to an incident in which an Indian university tried to pass off a Chinese-made robotic dog as its own innovation. So, what exactly went wrong at India's flagship AI gathering and why has it drawn such intense scrutiny?

An Indian university is facing backlash after one of its professors was caught falsely presenting a Chinese-made robot dog at a major artificial intelligence summit, it has reportedly since been asked to leave, as the institution's own. "You need to meet Orion. This has been developed by the Centre of Excellence at Galgotias University," Neha Singh, a professor of communications, told Indian state-run broadcaster DD News this week. The episode has drawn sharp criticism and has cast an uncomfortable spotlight on India's AI ambitions. The embarrassment was amplified by Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, who shared the video clip on his official social media account before the backlash.

Campaigners fear Narendra Modi could use AI to increase state surveillance and sway elections. Campaigners fear Narendra Modi could use AI to increase state surveillance and sway elections. 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.

India is hosting an artificial intelligence summit this week, bringing together heads of state and tech executives with hot-button issues on the agenda, including job disruption and child safety. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will on Monday afternoon inaugurate the five-day AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, which aims to declare a "shared roadmap for global AI governance and collaboration". Touted as the biggest edition yet, the Indian government is expecting 250,000 visitors from across the sector, including 20 national leaders and 45 ministerial-level delegations. It comes at a pivotal moment as AI rapidly transforms economies, reshapes labour markets and raises questions around regulations, security and ethics. From generative AI tools that can produce text and images to advanced systems used in defence, healthcare and climate modelling, AI has become a central focus for governments and corporations across the world.

Commuters walk along a street on the eve of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi on Sunday. New Delhi - A global artificial intelligence summit kicks off in New Delhi on Monday with big issues on the agenda, from job disruption to child safety, but some attendees warn the broad focus could diminish the chance of concrete commitments from world leaders. While frenzied demand for generative AI has turbocharged profits for many tech companies, anxiety is growing over the risks that it poses to society and the environment. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will on Monday afternoon inaugurate the five-day AI Impact Summit, which aims to declare a shared roadmap for global AI governance and collaboration. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

A new report has found an increase in AI tools being used to create digitally manipulated images or videos of women in India. A new report has found an increase in AI tools being used to create digitally manipulated images or videos of women in India. 'The chilling effect': how fear of'nudify' apps and AI deepfakes is keeping Indian women off the internet G aatha Sarvaiya would like to post on social media and share her work online. An Indian law graduate in her early 20s, she is in the earliest stages of her career and trying to build a public profile. The problem is, with AI-powered deepfakes on the rise, there is no longer any guarantee that the images she posts will not be distorted into something violating or grotesque.

The rapid advancement of large language models(LLMs) has intensified the need for domain and culture specific evaluation. Existing benchmarks are largely Anglocentric and domain-agnostic, limiting their applicability to India-centric contexts. To address this gap, we introduce BhashaBench V1, the first domain-specific, multi-task, bilingual benchmark focusing on critical Indic knowledge systems. BhashaBench V1 contains 74,166 meticulously curated question-answer pairs, with 52,494 in English and 21,672 in Hindi, sourced from authentic government and domain-specific exams. It spans four major domains: Agriculture, Legal, Finance, and Ayurveda, comprising 90+ subdomains and covering 500+ topics, enabling fine-grained evaluation. Evaluation of 29+ LLMs reveals significant domain and language specific performance gaps, with especially large disparities in low-resource domains. For instance, GPT-4o achieves 76.49% overall accuracy in Legal but only 59.74% in Ayurveda. Models consistently perform better on English content compared to Hindi across all domains. Subdomain-level analysis shows that areas such as Cyber Law, International Finance perform relatively well, while Panchakarma, Seed Science, and Human Rights remain notably weak. BhashaBench V1 provides a comprehensive dataset for evaluating large language models across India's diverse knowledge domains. It enables assessment of models' ability to integrate domain-specific knowledge with bilingual understanding. All code, benchmarks, and resources are publicly available to support open research.