For the first time, India invites China to its AI Summit

New Delhi: India has extended an official invitation to China to participate in its weeklong 2026 AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, a top government official told reporters here on Monday. This marks the first time that India has extended an official invitation to China to participate in its annual artificial intelligence event as a partnering nation, as New Delhi seeks to showcase its foundational AI models and present a policy directive that other nations agree with.

The move comes after China attended 2025’s AI Action Summit in France, where India was the co-chair nation—months after the country declined to be a signatory to the 2024 AI Summit in Seoul, South Korea.

“We’ve invited numerous nations around the world, particularly with a focus on the global south, to participate in the AI Impact Summit—and have already received confirmations from many, including France, to have them as part of it. We have also sent a formal invitation to China to take part as well,” said S. Krishnan, secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity).

China’s participation in global AI conversations has become a much-discussed factor, especially after China-origin DeepSeek and Qwen rose to the fore with cost-effective AI models that matched OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) and Google’s Gemini.

DeepSeek’s foundational models, released last year, promised to reduce the cost of training and operating AI models to a fraction of the current cost. However, their lack of global citations have not led to widespread adoption of their models at an enterprise level globally.

Krishnan did not confirm if China will be one of the 100-plus nations in attendance in February. An email sent to the embassy of China did not receive a response until press time.

The five-day India AI Impact Summit will take place from 15 to 20 February 2026. Krishnan said that over 50 heads of state are expected to be in attendance. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to host a welcome dinner for heads of state and top tech executives in New Delhi on 18 February, Krishnan added.

“We’ve also received confirmations from top executives from the AI world, including Bill Gates, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, and more. Having large tech firms make key announcements will be an important part of the Summit, even if that wouldn’t be the main focus,” Krishnan added.

India’s first AI summit in December 2023 saw a declaration signed on AI safety regulation by Global Partnership on AI (Gpai), a multinational body.

Stakeholders, however, questioned the efficacy of the declarations signed at AI summits globally.

“The idea would be to sign a definitive declaration, and the idea to sign a policy agreement that allows for a collaborative approach to regulating AI in a unified direction is also on the cards,” Krishnan said.

The secretary also added that there is ‘no conflict’ in terms of India’s approach to regulating AI, and no nation has raised ‘concerns’ about India’s approach to regulating AI.

“India’s approach to artificial intelligence regulation does not pose any concerns. Let alone any nation, no company also has raised fundamental concerns. Our efforts at the AI Impact Summit will be to arrive at a consensus, and also to showcase some of the foundational models that startups funded by the AI Mission have been working on,” he added.