For AI summit in February, government eyes G20 levels of participation

The Union government is proceeding with the AI Impact Summit’s organisation at a scale comparable to the G20 Summit in 2023, according to estimated participation numbers and the number of “pre-summit” events underway and planned.

Like the much-publicised 2023 G20 multilateral events, this event too is set to see participation from about 15 to 20 heads of state. Around 100,000 participants were expected for the main event in February, IT Secretary S. Krishnan said at a news briefing on Monday (December 29, 2025).

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While Mr. Krishnan did not refer to the G20, he outlined that the annual AI summits — a multilateral setup which began from Bletchley Park in the U.K. in 2023 to Seoul the following year and Paris in 2025 (where India was handed the reins for 2026) — have seen increasing participation. Officials have been keen to position India better on the world stage on AI-related issues, with a bevy of pre-summit events in India and abroad.

“In the initial summit, we had about 27 countries which participated, including India, and eventually 28 countries signed the declaration in Bletchley Park. By the time we came to France, there were more than 100 countries participating in various forms,” Mr. Krishnan said.

The event will also have top researchers and business leaders from AI firms, including Anthropic and Google Deepmind, with tentative confirmations from other leading players. 

“And we expect that number to get better in February, because there’s been a greater and greater interest as we go along,” Mr. Krishnan said. Several new countries that are part of the Global South would join this edition, he added. The government has not yet confirmed who these will be.

China will be invited, as has been the case since the inaugural U.K. summit and the ones that followed. Besides France, it is unclear which countries will be represented at the leve of head of state, although Mr. Krishnan said over a dozen heads of state have already confirmed their participation.

The scale of the pre-summit events is in and of itself notable — over the last few weeks, several technology-themed events by industry associations as well as private firms, both global and domestic, have been branded with the summit’s pre-event tag. Over 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 deliberate upon multiple themes, with working groups chiselling away at issues, including AI and its impact on work, trust and safety protocols for AI models, and using AI in specific industries. 

Mr. Krishnan outlined India’s priorities for the summit — one was that AI shouldn’t be concentrated in just a few geographies or companies. It “needs to be made available more broadly as a horizontal technology to actually support development of humankind as a whole, and ensure that across the world, all countries have access to the various elements of AI; this includes the infrastructure, whether it is compute, whether it is [large language] models, whether it is data… all of those plus the possible applications,” he said.

Second, Mr. Krishnan said, was pushing a governance framework for AI that balances the caution of markets that are regulation-heavy and those that are not. “We need to approach AI with a positive mindset as a technology which we can take significant advantage of,” Mr. Krishnan said.

“Many people have spoken about the possible downsides. How we protect ourselves against the downsides, and at the same time take significant advantage of AI, is the key message that we want to push in this overall framework, and inclusion of the Global South in particular, led in a sense by India, is a very important element of what’s being attempted,” the IT Secretary said.