IIndia will celebrate 80 years of independence from the UK in August 2027. At almost the same moment, “early versions of true superintelligence” could emerge, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman said this week.
This is an emerging coincidence that has raised a controversial question AI Impact Summit In Delhi, hosted by Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India: Can India avoid returning to the status of a vassal state when it imports AI to enhance the prospects of its 1.4 billion people?
Modi’s appetite for harnessing the potential of AI is great. He compared it Thursday to a turning point that resets the direction of civilization, like “when the first spark hit the stone.” The most common analogy heard among the thousands of visitors to the summit was the dawn of lightning, but Modi was talking about fire.
Their desire to use AI to supercharge Indian economic growth matches that of big US tech companies. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic all played major roles at the summit and announced deals to get ChatGPT, Gemini, and Cloud AI into the hands of more people.
The Trump administration was paving the way for three AI companies by considering AI central in the battle for supremacy with China. The US government signed Pax Silica, a technology agreement that connects India closer to US technology and away from Beijing.
At the time of the signing, US Under Secretary for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg stressed the threat from China if India should think about looking elsewhere for its AI. “We have seen the lights of a great Indian city extinguished with a keystroke,” he said in an apparent reference. Suspected Chinese cyber attack On Mumbai in 2020.
India lacks the semiconductors, power plants and huge gigawatt datacenters to do the job alone. Like most other countries, it faces a choice between American and Chinese AI models. What they choose could have serious consequences for who controls India’s future because if the power of AI emerges as predicted, it will not only transform economic and social structures, but become their new cornerstone.
Stuart Russell, a professor of artificial intelligence at Berkeley who closely follows India’s progress, said: “If we talk about AGI, AI is going to produce 80% of the global economy, all manufacturing, most agriculture, all services will just be done, managed by AI, produced by AI.”
Imagine, he said, a rural Indian village was deprived of a health centre. In the future, AI could design the hospital and “a bunch of giant quad copters come carrying materials and a bunch of robots come and assemble everything. Two weeks later, you’ve got a hospital.”
In this scenario, technology becomes completely integral to the well-being of a country. Elements of sovereignty can be fought, but how successful this will be remains to be seen. The power of AI is such that its controller gets huge benefits.
Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, said at the summit: “It may sound absurd, but AI could also help India achieve extraordinary economic growth of 25%.” If this happens, it will take India to a per capita GDP in a decade equal to that of Greece today. How can a leader oppose?
Mr Krishnan, Modi’s technical secretary, said India realized it must cooperate with like-minded countries to ensure it does not become a “slave”. This is a high-risk decision.
At present, there seems to be little possibility of India turning towards China. It has AI models, but there is tension along the Himalayan border and Chinese companies and leaders were scarce at the summit.
So will India overtake American AI? Silicon Valley companies speak the language of cooperation, not control. “We don’t see India as a customer, we see it as a strategic partner,” said Chris Lehane, global policy lead at OpenAI.
US officials framed the agreement with India as an alliance between the two countries that “broke centuries of colonial rule” and “says two great democracies that we will build back together”.
The Guardian asked Donald Trump’s science and technology adviser Michael Kratsios whether India was at risk of being controlled by the US under a new form of digital colonialism.
“I would say it’s actually the opposite,” he said. “Any country that builds on top of the American AI stack will have the world’s most open, freely controlled, secure stack. And that’s why we’re eager to soon share it with so many countries that are prioritizing their AI sovereignty.”
Russell sees another possibility. “I think American companies basically want to penetrate at the high-school and middle-school level to create a group of AI-addicted people who can’t tie their shoelaces without the help of AI,” he said. “Silicon Valley has always attracted people’s attention. You can make money later and it works. Google and Facebook generate huge amounts of money.”
So can India create its own AI? It is investing billions in datacenter and semiconductor capacity, but it takes years to come online.
Altman was asked on Thursday how Indian entrepreneurs can build their own AI and his response was clear. “Look, the way it works is we’re going to tell you that competing with us based on training is completely hopeless and you shouldn’t even try, and it’s your job to try anyway and I believe both of those things.”
India could put pressure on US tech companies to adapt their AI to the kaleidoscope of their languages ​​and cultures and try to push for guardrails. There is a lot at stake. As the summit ended, Joanna Shields, a former Facebook and Google executive and Britain’s internet security minister, warned: “If we have a world where we’re just accepting models from the global North, we will lose our cultural diversity, our uniqueness as people, no matter where we come from… We don’t want to develop a monoculture based on a handful of models that everyone uses around the world and we lose the richness of who we are, what makes us human. Makes it.”
