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AI Impact Summit 2026, Delhi: AI Openness Report

AI Impact Summit Documentary

Executive Summary

The AI Impact Summit 2026 marked a decisive shift in the global AI conversation: from safety and frontier competition to impact, access and sovereignty — with openness elevated from a technical preference to a strategic imperative.

Openness goes mainstream

• The US Ambassador, the French President, the UK AI Minister and India’s Prime Minister all endorsed “open source in AI” — a world away from Bletchley Park 2023, where only the French and US delegations uttered the words
• Over 150,000 registered participants across five days in Delhi; dozens of events focused on open source and digital public goods
• The New Delhi Declaration, signed by 88 countries including the UK, US and (notably) China, explicitly calls out open source AI applications

Sovereignty redefined

• Sovereignty was consistently reframed as sovereign capability — the ability to inspect, adapt, deploy and govern AI systems without dependency on foreign black boxes — not isolation
• Growing discussion of a five-layer stack and where in it sovereignty is necessary; resource pooling among “middle nations” gained traction, with Yann LeCun advocating an international consortium to train a truly open global model

The year of the ontology — and open washing

• Terms like open source, open weights, digital public good and civic tech were used inconsistently across the Summit, risking a new form of open washing
• Sarvam AI’s small language models, launched at the Summit “in a blaze of open source announcements”, were released on a proprietary non-commercial licence — neither open source nor open weights
• The report calls for meaningful openness, clear licensing and sustained engagement with the open source community

The UK-India partnership

• The UK is India’s second-largest open source collaboration partner after the US; the UK leads the world per capita in open source participation
• The UK AI Minister’s statement that “the UK will become the home of open source AI” was launched with the OpenUK DocuShort on the main stage of the High Commission event
• The OpenUK TESSERA hackathon saw Indian and UK teams integrate Cambridge’s fully open geospatial model with IIT-Delhi’s CoRE Stack to bring geospatial AI to rural India

What comes next

• The 2027 Summit will be hosted by Switzerland — an opportunity to shift the open source needle further
• Tools not rules: open source tooling (Inspect, ROOST, OECD catalogues) is emerging as de facto cross-border governance, if the open source communities are genuinely engaged

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