India will host the AI Impact Summit 2026 at Bharat Mandapam from February 16 to 20, bringing together global heads of state, technology CEOs, AI researchers and policymakers to deliberate on governance, ethics and deployment of artificial intelligence.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the five-day summit and participate in a high-level CEO roundtable. The event, the fourth in a series of global AI gatherings after the UK AI Safety Summit (2023), the Seoul Summit (2024) and the Paris AI Action Summit (2025), is anchored around three “Sutras” — People, Planet and Progress.
According to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva are among several world leaders scheduled to attend. Other confirmed participants include Netherlands Prime Minister Dick Schoof, Sri Lanka President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, Bhutan Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay and Mauritius Prime Minister Navinchandra Ramgoolam.
Also slated to attend are Spain’s Pedro Sanchez Perez-Castejon, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Croatia Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, Estonia President Alar Karis, Finland Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, Kazakhstan Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov, Liechtenstein’s Hereditary Prince Alois, Slovakia President Peter Pellegrini and Switzerland President Guy Parmelin. Vice Presidents Edmundo Lara Montano of Bolivia, Bharrat Jagdeo of Guyana, Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia and Sebastien Pillay of Seychelles are expected as well.
The MEA said ministerial delegations from over 45 countries, along with the UN Secretary-General and senior representatives of international organisations, will participate.
Among global technology leaders, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis are scheduled to attend, along with Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has cancelled his visit due to unforeseen circumstances.
Indian industry leaders including Natarajan Chandrasekaran, Nandan Nilekani, Sunil Bharti Mittal, K. Krithivasan, Salil Parekh and Roshni Nadar Malhotra are also confirmed participants.
Leading AI researchers such as Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell will join deliberations that span over 700 sessions. The summit will focus on AI safety, ethical deployment, data protection, sovereign AI strategies and the development of indigenous foundation models.
Seven thematic working groups, co-chaired by representatives from the Global North and South, will present proposals on AI Commons, trusted AI tools, shared compute infrastructure and sector-specific use cases. Discussions are scheduled on sustainable and energy-efficient AI systems, workforce skilling, and applications across agriculture, healthcare, finance and education.
Indian start-ups will showcase innovations in multilingual AI, generative AI for content creation and advanced analytics for healthcare and materials research.
“The summit is a pivotal platform to ensure AI development remains inclusive and human-centric,” IT Secretary S Krishnan said, underlining India’s emphasis on ethical, scalable and globally responsible AI deployment.
The gathering builds on India’s experience with digital public infrastructure initiatives such as UPI and Aadhaar, reflecting its broader ambition to integrate technology, governance and innovation while shaping global norms for the AI era.
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