New Delhi, February 18 – When it comes to AI, India demonstrates strong optimism and trust, while Western countries are concerned about the emerging technology, former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Wednesday.
Sunak cautioned that bridging this gap requires targeted governance efforts.
"I think closing that confidence gap is as much a policy task as it is a technical one," he said during a fireside chat with Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang at the ongoing 'India AI Impact Summit 2026' here.
"Across the world, we’re seeing different attitudes towards AI. In countries like India, there’s enormous optimism and trust, and in Western countries, we’re seeing that anxiety is still the dominant feeling towards AI," he told the gathering.
Sunak further stated that India is a country with “huge digital ambitions and capacity", underscoring the extraordinary scale of recent AI investments.
This year, "the large AI companies are going to spend 20 times more on developing this technology than the US did for the Manhattan Project (to build the nuclear bomb)", the former British Prime Minister noted.
According to Wang, "we are sitting here right now at such an incredibly exciting moment for technology. I think we are at the beginning of a true acceleration".
He hailed India’s rise in the global AI ecosystem, calling it "a very positive case study".
“There are now more consumer AI startups in India than in the United States," he noted.
Wang said that AI is entering a new paradigm.
“We’ve really begun an entirely new paradigm -- the era of recursive self-improvement,” he said, adding that productivity has grown dramatically.
AL models are now themselves are increasingly accelerating the development of subsequent AI systems.
The 'India AI Impact Summit 2026' is being held at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi from February 16 to 20. The summit has brought together policymakers, industry leaders, academicians, innovators and civil society representatives from across the world.