The fourth global AI summit convened this week at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi \u2014 the largest gathering yet, the first hosted in the Global South, and by several measures the most politically charged since the series began at Bletchley Park in 2023. Over five days, more than 20 heads of state, 60 ministers, and the chief executives of virtually every major AI company on earth descended on India’s capital to talk about the future of a technology that is simultaneously generating record profits and record anxiety.<\/p>\n
Sundar Pichai was there. So was Sam Altman. Dario Amodei of Anthropic. Mukesh Ambani. Rishi Sunak. Emmanuel Macron shared a stage with Narendra Modi. Ant\u00f3nio Guterres addressed the hall. Bill Gates was supposed to speak but pulled out hours before his keynote, the Gates Foundation citing a desire to keep the focus on the summit’s priorities \u2014 though the timing, amid renewed scrutiny of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, was noted by everyone in attendance.<\/p>\n
It was, by any measure, a spectacle. More than 250,000 visitors. Over 300 exhibitors across a 70,000-square-metre expo. Delhi hotel suites that normally run at $2,200 a night were listed at $33,000. The Supreme Court issued a circular allowing advocates to appear by video link because of anticipated traffic gridlock. And India set a Guinness World Record for the most pledges received for an AI responsibility campaign in 24 hours \u2014 250,946 of them.<\/p>\n
But spectacle is not the same as substance. And for all the diplomatic language, carefully worded voluntary commitments and carefully staged photo opportunities, the most important words spoken at the India AI Impact Summit may have come not from a head of state or a Silicon Valley chief executive, but from the 32-year-old founder of a French AI company that most people outside the industry have never heard of.<\/p>\n
Mensch’s Warning<\/strong><\/p>\n Arthur Mensch, co-founder and chief executive of Mistral AI, took the stage on Thursday and said what many in the room were thinking but few were willing to say out loud.<\/p>\n “We are at risk today,” he told delegates. “We are facing too much concentration of power in artificial intelligence. We don’t want to be in a world where three or four enormous companies actually own the deployment and the making of AI \u2014 actually own access to information.”<\/p>\n It is not, on the surface, a novel observation. The dominance of a small number of American firms in frontier AI \u2014 OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta \u2014 has been a recurring theme at every global AI gathering since Bletchley. But Mensch was making a more specific and more uncomfortable point: that despite three years of summits, declarations and voluntary commitments, the concentration has only deepened.<\/p>\n Mistral, valued at nearly \u20ac12 billion, is Europe’s leading independent AI model builder. It is also a fraction of the size of its American competitors. OpenAI was last reported to be valued at over $850 billion. The US-based cloud providers \u2014 AWS, Google, Microsoft \u2014 are building out most of the infrastructure needed to power and run AI models globally. The asymmetry is not shrinking. It is accelerating.<\/p>\n Mensch’s argument went beyond market share. He warned that concentrated ownership of AI creates excessive geopolitical leverage \u2014 that countries and institutions which rely on a handful of foreign providers for their AI infrastructure are ceding something more fundamental than a technology contract. They are ceding sovereignty. “Everyone who runs AI workloads must have access to the turn-on and turn-off button,” he said. “They must not be dependent on external providers who can turn off the button.”<\/p>\n He called for a different path: decentralised AI, built on open-source models, owned and operated by the countries and institutions that use it. It was, unmistakably, a pitch for Mistral’s own approach. But it was also a challenge to every government in the room \u2014 and to the American companies sitting in the front rows.<\/p>\n The Gap Between Words and Action<\/strong><\/p>\n The AI summit series was born in November 2023 at Bletchley Park, where the UK convened an urgent conversation about AI safety following the explosive growth of ChatGPT. That gathering produced the Bletchley Declaration \u2014 a statement signed by 28 countries acknowledging the risks of frontier AI. Seoul in 2024 followed with further voluntary commitments. Paris in 2025 was billed as an “Action Summit” that would move from promises to outcomes.<\/p>\n