NEW DELHI: UK Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy and former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak – on opposite sides of the political aisle – took to the stage on Friday to talk about something they see more clearly than politics – artificial intelligence (AI) and the future it will shape.
Symbolism was important. Lammy has maintained AI policy continuity, building on the foundations laid under Sunak, including the first Global AI Summit and the 2023 UK AI White Paper.
Lammy described this year as “the most extraordinary year in the relationship” between India and the UK – which is anchored by a new trade agreement and the announcement that nine British universities will open campuses in India. On talent, he was frank, “Last month, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said she wants to attract the world’s best AI talent, and India is at the top of that list.”
He suggested that simplified visa rules would be key to achieving this ambition. The UK has already started facilitating work visa pathways to attract top AI talent.
The New Delhi Frontier AI Impact Commitments emerging from this summit focus on two key themes towards AI working effectively for diverse populations. First, collecting insights into the use of AI in the real world, but with the privacy and anonymity of analytics to help make policy on jobs, skills and workforce development. Second, multilingual and contextual assessments of AI systems across a number of languages and cultural contexts with a particular focus on countries in the Global South.
Lamy was clear about India’s role in shaping this framework. “Very grateful to India for centering the Global South. Clearly, India has a huge contribution to make, and recognition. The face of the average worker in the Global South in a very rural society, and the enormous opportunities, that exist in agriculture,” he said. “AI makes such a difference.”
Lindy Cameron, the British High Commissioner, reinforced this trend in a conversation with HT. She pointed to the India-UK Joint Center for Artificial Intelligence and the India-UK Connectivity and Innovation Center as ways to build more inclusive AI ecosystems. At the summit, the UK also announced a partnership aimed at using AI to help doctors diagnose faster, teachers personalize learning, councils deliver services in minutes, and businesses create the next generation of jobs.
“You can use the latest technologies and solve global challenges, but it must be done safely, securely and responsibly, to achieve massive global impact,” she said.
The Delhi summit is the fourth global AI summit since the first edition at Bletchley Parkin 2023, which focused on the catastrophic risks of AI. The Seoul Summit in 2024 expands this to include safety, innovation and inclusivity. France’s 2025 AI Action Summit focused on implementation and economic opportunity. India 2026 has pushed the debate towards “global AI segmentation” and democratization of AI resources.
The fifth World Summit on Artificial Intelligence is scheduled to be held in Geneva, Switzerland, next year.
Cooperation in the field of medicine and artificial intelligence
Moving away from geopolitics, the discussion turned to scientific convergence. Sunak highlighted the long-standing advantage of life sciences in the UK – home of the Watson and Crick model that determined the three-dimensional double helix structure of DNA – and how that now intersects with artificial intelligence. “With our strength in AI, because those two things have come together, we now do drug discovery in a completely different way,” Sunak says, adding that up to 95% of trials don’t work.
This convergence is no longer theoretical. Sir Demis Hassabis, the well-known CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind, also co-founded the artificial intelligence company Isomorphic Labs. This month, the London-based AI drug discovery company announced a proprietary drug design engine that advances beyond AlphaFold 3 to formulate complex and previously “undruggable” targets, with improved accuracy, identification of new binding pockets using amino acid sequences, and 2.3 times higher performance than AlphaFold 3 in predicting antibody and antigen structure.
Sunak framed this opportunity in broader terms. “As we talk about economic growth with AI, the ability to actually solve some of those profound challenges that we face, and improve our health and wellness, are the most exciting opportunities. And when I look at India, which has similar strength in healthcare and AI, I feel like it’s a very clear way for us to collaborate.”
The signal is clear. AI is no longer just about chatbots and productivity tools; It’s about compressing drug discovery timelines, reducing failure rates, and translating computational power into public health outcomes. For two countries with deep research ecosystems and large patient populations, the collaboration here is not aspirational – it is strategic.
The question of sovereignty
The conversation also confronted the structural reality of the geopolitics of AI. Lamy acknowledged the prevailing narrative, which is that the United States and China are dual poles in models, chips and computing infrastructure. He noted that India and the UK are navigating this landscape with a focus on sovereign capacity.
The UK established the Sovereign AI Unit last year, in line with its AI Opportunities Action Plan and supported by £500 million of funding. The goal is to develop local data, computing capacity and talent pipelines while working with frontier companies including Anthropic, Nvidia and OpenAI to ensure national capacity.
Sunak reframed sovereignty by historical analogy.
“There’s a very powerful historical lesson that we can all learn, and that’s because every time one of these big technological revolutions happens, it’s not necessarily the country that invents the technology, it’s also the country that benefits the most from it,” he said, citing the printing press invented in Mainz in 1440, and how other European countries eventually gained a greater advantage due to regulatory and institutional conditions.
The meaning is clear. In artificial intelligence, invention alone does not determine the outcome.
The UK’s regulatory approach reflects this philosophy. It follows a sectoral model, where individual regulatory bodies shape AI frameworks within their fields rather than relying on a single central authority. The five principles outlined in the 2023 White Paper – safety, security and robustness; Transparency and interpretability; fairness; Accountability and Governance; As well as the ability to compete, recover, and form the backbone.
While the UK initially avoided dedicated AI legislation, momentum is building towards a legal framework in 2026 to address the risks of frontier models. The Copyright in AI Training (Use and Access) Act 2025 introduced reporting requirements relating to copyright in AI training – requiring detailed analysis of AI training data, in particular addressing licensing and transparency in modular training, technical measures to protect copyright such as metadata-based identifiers, and the impact of AI developed outside the UK.
It is an AI race that both India and the UK seem determined not only to participate in and win, but also to play according to For their rules.
