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OpenUK and OpenHQ Support Global Role For AI Openness At India-hosted Global AI Impact Summit, New Delhi, 16-20 February

Zin Lwin
13th February 2026

OpenUK and OpenHQ Support Global Role For AI Openness
At India-hosted Global AI Impact Summit, New Delhi, 16-20 February

  • Global AI Impact Summit attracts 60 ministers and heads of state to New Delhi next week, alongside open source leadership in dozens of events featuring hundreds of AI openness leaders
  • OpenUK CEO Amanda Brock amongst list joining closed World Leaders’ Inauguration Day, 19th 
  • OpenUK and OpenHQ hosting and participating in main summit and fringe events across city
  • Main Summit panel hosted by OpenUK with Wikimedia, Tony Blair Institute, and Pleias focused on resilience and open source
  • Impact of collaboration and open source on free flow of innovation, access and control are critical topics for Indian AI Impact Summit with dozens of open source and digital public good events
  • OpenUK will distil the Global AI Impact Summit AI Openness conversion into Report on 20th

London UK and New Delhi, India  –  13 February 2026 – OpenUK, the non-profit organisation convening the UK’s Open Technology sector, announced its support for the AI Impact Summit being held in Delhi from 16th February to 20th February 2026, joined by sister organisation OpenHQ, supporting international open source communities in their policy work at critical events like the Summit. 

OpenUK will support the Summit’s overall vision around AI, concentrating on the role that open source and AI openness will play in global development and adoption. Amanda Brock, CEO at OpenUK, will take part in keynote panels and workshops at the Summit, as well as collaborating with the open source community in India.

OpenUK has participated in multiple events across India in the last nine months, engaging the local open source and AI communities to raise awareness of the role of the Global Leaders AI Impact Summit. By igniting the conversation, the organisation ensured the inclusion of open source front and centre across the sessions at the Summit. 

By supporting local community engagement with policy makers to enable true impact on the future for AI as a legacy of the summit, OpenUK has inspired the inclusion of dozens of sessions with hundreds of speakers. This encouraged communities to drill down on open source and digital public good, providing access for all, breaking dependency and democratising AI.

“Globally, AI combined with open source is critical. It enables countries and their citizens to have access to AI, to iteratively innovate and collaborate across borders, companies and countries. This Summit has the potential to set the tone for the future of AI. Through its international sister organisation OpenHQ, the OpenUK team has supported the open source community across India to have a representative voice at the Summit. These sessions offer the opportunity to shape policy decisions during the week and represent the needs of the global community. We are part of a very strong UK presence at the Summit, recognising that the UK is India’s second largest partner when it comes to open source collaboration.” commented Amanda Brock, CEO at OpenUK and keynote attendee of the Summit.

Further Supporting Quotes:

Dr Laura Gilbert, Senior Director AI, Tony Blair Institute

“Joining this panel at the India AI Impact Summit follows immediately on TBI’s report, ‘Open Source: How Middle Powers Can Build Influence in the Age of AI’, making the case that openness isn’t just a technical preference, it’s a strategic imperative. For middle powers, real sovereignty isn’t about building everything from scratch or going it alone. It’s about sovereign capability: the practical ability to adapt, deploy and govern AI on your own terms, without being locked into a handful of platforms or providers. The public sector has both the most to gain and the most to lose from getting this wrong. Open approaches allow governments to inspect the systems they use, build in-house capability, and reduce the single-vendor risks that threaten security and continuity of critical services. The countries that build open ecosystems, not just adopt open models, will be the ones that capture lasting value from AI.”

Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikimedia

“I’m honored to join this panel at the IndiaAI Impact Summit. Generative AI represents a pivotal shift in how we approach global challenges, and I look forward to discussing how we can harness this technology responsibly to drive meaningful impact.”

Anastasia Stasenko, Co-Founder and CEO, Pleias

“From Paris to Delhi, the conversation around AI sovereignty has undergone a quiet but decisive shift. A year ago, the question was whether open source AI could compete with frontier labs. Today, the question is how it reshapes who gets to build. This is the route from policy to participation – from debating whether alternatives are viable to watching them emerge. Open source is not a second-best option for those who can’t afford the frontier. It’s the infrastructure that makes decentralized training capacity possible, that turns communities from consumers of AI into contributors to it. The Paris Summit asked what we wanted to protect, and in Delhi we are asking what we’re ready to build.”

Prof Anil Madhavapeddy, Professor of Planetary Computing, University of Cambridge

“Governments worldwide face a choice about whether to take the blue pill or the red pill when it comes to AI infrastructure. Taking the blue pill via black-box AI is the easy path, but cedes control over training inputs, and results are not reproducible and ever-shifting. Taking the red pill by using open AI models means that societal decisions can be justified, aligned for equity, and remain accountable. I’m excited about developing and deploying fully end-to-end open geospatial foundation models such as TESSERA that can be used immediately within India without requiring huge computational resources, but can also be extended and retrained in a sovereign fashion.”

During the Summit, OpenUK will lead or take part in sessions at the Main Summit and its Fringe:

    • 19th February
      • Main Summit, World Leader Day – Amanda joining as guest of Indian Government
      • Fringe, OpenUK and OpenHQ Hackathon with Bharath AI Mission, and special OpenUK guest, Prof Anil Madhavapeddy
      • OpenUK Documentary Short with Kanishka Naryan, AI Minister and David Soria Parra, Co-Founder of MCP, launched at High Commission Party hosted by High Commissioner
    • 20th February 
      • Main Summit, Amanda Brock joining Main Stage panel: Inclusion, Innovation, and the Future of AI
      • OpenUK AI Openness at the Impact Summit Report will be released, sharing insight into the conversations and announcements across the week in New Delhi.
    • 21st February
      • KCD New Delhi 2026 event, discussing the future for open source, cloud and infrastructure during the keynote session on 20th February. Amanda will also be part of the Keynote panel.

About OpenUK and OpenHQ

OpenUK is the organisation for the business of Open Technology, being Open Source Software, Open Source Hardware, Open Data, Open Standards and AI Openness across the UK. Its purpose is UK leadership and global collaboration in Open Technology. OpenUK works on three pillars: Community, Legal and Policy and Learning.  In 2025 OpenUK focused on AI and openness and soft launched its sister organisation OpenHQ to focus on coalescing international communities such as that in India for international policy initiatives. 

OpenUK is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee, company number 11209475.

Twitter: @openuk_uk

Bluesky: @openuk.bsky.social 

Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@openuk 

LinkedIn: openukopentechnology

Website: openuk.uk and theopenhq.com

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