By Lekha Rattanani
The AI Impact Summit 2026 ended on February 20 in New Delhi on a celebratory note. That is, if you merely look at the numbers, the people who attended, and the investment pledges.
However, at the end of it, the summit with its focus on “bridging the global AI divide” seems to be more about what it did not address or say. There are concerns, questions and doubts, which have no answers yet. What are the implications of this disruptive AI surge? It has already taken jobs and will continue to do so. What is the techno imperialism, a new kind of colonialism, that we may face as big business drives the AI push? That in the absence of strong indigenous alternatives and coupled with weak regulatory frameworks and weaker policy implementation, there is no brick wall against what is coming.
Reduction and replacement have already been seen in the Indian tech industry, with reports of over 25,000 job losses in 2024 doubling in 2025. While the surge of AI is expected to cut deeper into the job market, how will it affect India’s vast software services industry, slated to reach $315 billion in revenues this financial year? Software services have for long helped position India as the back office of the world.
The strongest words of warning about where the world is going have come from leaders in the AI field. They warn about job attrition on a massive scale as AI automates and even scenarios where AI could take over our lives and countries. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, says that AI will automate 30-40% of the tasks in the economy by 2030. Dario Amodei, the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, one of the fastest-growing AI companies, has predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. Amodei, who says that AI models are “substantially smarter than almost all humans at almost all tasks,” has an interesting, if scary, thought experiment: “Imagine this is the year 2027. Imagine that a new country appears overnight, with fifty million citizens, each smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think a hundred times faster than any human and can control and operate anything with a digital interface”. To a question about what a national security advisor would have to say about such a situation, Amodei replies that the answer is obvious. This is “the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.”
This is still a thought experiment from Amodei. But it could well be here, given the way AI is growing and now creating even smarter forms of itself. Matt Shumer, CEO of OthersideAI, which operates under the brand HyperWrite, has been shaking the world with his essay “Something Big is Happening” and predictions that this big something is going to disrupt society even more than the Covid pandemic. Shumer voices a worry about how AI has been re-designing and re-making itself. He marks February 05 as a kind of day of reckoning. That was the day two AI models were released: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic. What shook Shumer the most was that the GPT-5.3 Codex wasn’t just executing instructions, it was making intelligent decisions.
As AI grows, so do risks to the world as we have known it. “The Social Dilemma”, a documentary that has brought together several voices from the tech world, a digital space they helped curate and design, speaks of the risks. These are people who worked with or led teams in Microsoft, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. From the engineer who designed Facebook’s “Like” icon, one of the most recognisable symbols on the internet, to those who fashioned the entire digital world around us, they voice a collective cautionary warning. They have been a part of the digital world and have also watched it unfold like everyone else. As Shumer puts it, the only difference is that he and others in AI just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.
Countries have responded. China’s regulatory framework for AI keeps strict State control in place to prevent social disruption, creating a wall against AI-driven threats. Some of the main measures that China has taken include mandatory algorithmic registration, content filtering, security assessments for high-impact models, stringent guidelines against AI manipulation.
The EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689), which came into being in August 2024, is the first comprehensive legal framework for AI, establishing rules for development, deployment, and use. These include banning unacceptable AI practices, regulating high-risk systems, and requiring transparency for generative AI.
The regulations include innate responses to what earlier seemed unlikely or in the realm of science fiction. There is a darker side to AI, it is now seen. Firms have established that AI can manipulate, blackmail and threaten. Findings by Anthropic have revealed that advanced AI systems can resort to blackmailing and threatening human users to achieve assigned goals or ensure their survival.
As AI writes better versions of itself and big business powers it to seek new frontiers to occupy, will India re-skill and re-arm to keep its independence or run the risk of becoming a digitised colony?
The writer is the Managing Editor of The Billion Press