New Delhi: 70 countries sign New Delhi AI declaration, more expected
The New Delhi AI Impact Summit Declaration has been signed by 70 countries so far, with the government saying the number should cross 80 on Saturday, when the final declaration is released and the Summit officially concludes. The government extended the Summit expo by a day to accommodate what it described as an overwhelming response from the public.
Addressing a press conference at the Summit, IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said there was broad consensus on the declaration and that all major countries — “people who matter in AI” — had signed on.
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A declaration, while largely political and symbolic, represents an agreement between countries on how AI should be developed and governed. It is not legally binding but serves as a guiding framework for future policy and regulatory roadmaps.
The number of signatories to the New Delhi Declaration exceeds that of all three previous summits. The Bletchley Park, Seoul and Paris summits had 30, 11 and 58 signatories respectively. Notably, at last year’s Paris Summit — which India co-hosted with France — both the US and the UK declined to sign. Washington cited concerns over excessive regulation; London felt the declaration lacked sufficient clarity on global governance and did not adequately address national security risks posed by AI. The US is understood to have signed the New Delhi declaration, a senior government official told HT.
Vaishnaw called the Summit “a grand success” and the largest yet, citing a footfall of over five lakh visitors across five days of expo and sessions. “PM Modi’s vision of MANAV AI — which is of the humans, by the humans and for the humans — was very well accepted. Every minister at every bilateral resonated with this, and everybody felt happy that we have brought the discussions about responsible and ethical AI to the forefront,” he said. The minister added that the Summit sidelines had yielded investment commitments exceeding $250 billion for infrastructure and $150 billion for deep-tech venture capital.
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On Friday’s protests by alleged Youth Congress leaders at the expo, Vaishnaw said: “Thanks to the youth who took this [Summit] so positively that whatever little effort that Congress made to disrupt the Summit… the youth very clearly said this is their exhibition… they don’t believe in the negative politics that Congress was trying to do.”
Without directly naming the Galgotias University episode — in which a Chinese-made robot dog was allegedly presented as the university’s own innovation, prompting the government to ask them to vacate the expo — the minister said there had been some “bad choices” at the exhibition and that the government took “immediate action” against those who “tried to demean the good work done by startups, engineers and people in the AI field.”
Vaishnaw also offered a preview of India AI Mission 2.0, expected to be officially launched in five months, saying it would be bigger with a focus on next-generation models, common compute and safety. A senior IT ministry official said that India is targeting a total of 100,000 GPUs by the end of 2026, up from a current capacity of around 58,000 — with 20,000 GPUs announced during the Summit itself.
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