Declaration on leveraging AI ‘for growth and good’ endorsed at global summit in India
The Indian government concluded this year’s AI Impact Summit with the adoption of the New Delhi Declaration on AI Impact, which was endorsed by 89 countries and the EU.
The summit took place in New Delhi between 16 to 21 February. It brought together world leaders, international AI firms and Indian innovators with the aim of reaching a consensus on how to advance AI in an inclusive and responsible way.
The declaration is based around seven pillars, or ‘Chakras’. They include the development of human capital; broadening AI access for social empowerment; ensuring trustworthiness and energy efficiency of AI systems; applying AI to scientific discovery; democratising AI resources; and using AI to grow economies and produce social goods.
Among the countries to have signed up to the declaration are all members of the G7.
India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) said the declaration reflected “a broad-based global consensus on leveraging AI for economic growth and social good”. The ministry also stressed the need for leaders to strengthen “international cooperation and multistakeholder engagement”, while “respecting national sovereignty” and “advancing AI through accessible and trustworthy frameworks”.
Speaking at the opening of the summit, Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s union minister for electronics and information technology, highlighted that the vision of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi is to “democratise [AI] technology, deploy it at scale, and make it accessible to all”.
“AI is a foundational technology. It is already transforming how we work, learn, and make decisions,” Vaishnaw said.
“Once we honestly harness the benefits of AI, we must also find collective solutions for mitigating risks. By placing human safety and dignity at the heart of AI, we can move forward with conviction. Let us shape an AI future of the humans, by the humans, and for the humans.”
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Commitments to AI impact
In addition to the declaration, two key voluntary commitments – known as the New Delhi Frontier AI Impact Commitments – were announced at the summit.
The first of the two commitments, titled Advancing Understanding of Real-World AI Usage, will see participating organisations – including global frontier AI companies and India-based innovators – work together to “generate evidence that supports policymaking on the impact of AI on jobs, skills, productivity, and economic transformation”.
MeitY said that “by enabling data-driven analysis of how AI is being deployed across sectors, the initiative aims to help governments and institutions craft informed strategies that maximise benefits while mitigating risks associated with technological change”.
The second commitment – titled Strengthening Multilingual and Contextual Evaluations – centres on “efforts to ensure effectiveness of AI systems across languages, cultures, and real-world use cases”. Under the commitment, organisations and governments will collaborate to develop “datasets, benchmarks, and expertise that support evaluation in under-represented languages and cultural contexts”.
The aim is to enhance AI performance for “diverse populations” within India, and to help promote access to “high-quality AI experiences” at a global level, while still allowing for “flexibility” in the choice of tools and “evaluation methodologies”.
The Indian Ministry of External Affairs said at the summit that the advent of AI marked “an inflection point in the trajectory of technological evolution” and added that “the choices that we make today will shape the AI-enabled world that future generations will inherit”.
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About Jack Aldane
Jack is a British journalist, cartoonist and podcaster. He graduated from Heythrop College London in 2009 with a BA in philosophy, before living and working in China for three years as a freelance reporter. After training in financial journalism at City University from 2013 to 2014, Jack worked at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters before moving into editing magazines on global trade and development finance. Shortly after editing opinion writing for UnHerd, he joined the independent think tank ResPublica, where he led a media campaign to change the health and safety requirements around asbestos in UK public buildings. As host and producer of The Booking Club podcast – a conversation series featuring prominent authors and commentators at their favourite restaurants – Jack continues to engage today’s most distinguished thinkers on the biggest problems pertaining to ideology and power in the 21st century. He joined Global Government Forum as its Senior Staff Writer and Community Co-ordinator in 2021.
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