As the AI Summit unfolds in Delhi this week, India must necessarily navigate an unstated but inescapable tension: the aspiration for collective solutions in the development of artificial intelligence on the one hand, and the imperative of protecting national interests in a world of geopolitical rivalry. This tension is hardly new. It has marked the geopolitics of every transformative technology. But the scale and scope of artificial intelligence—its capacity to reshape economies, militaries, and political systems—make the clash between universalism and national advantage sharper than ever before. No nation can afford to treat AI as only a public good. The calls for international cooperation at the summit then coexist uneasily with pursuit of national interest. The summit’s soaring rhetoric on global governance cannot mask the strategic calculations of its principal participants—including India, the host. How, then, does Delhi manage this contradiction? India has travelled this road before. In 1955, at the height of the Cold War nuclear contest between Washington and Moscow, an Indian scientist—Dr Homi J Bhabha, head of India’s fledgling atomic energy programme—presided …