New Delhi, Feb. 22 -- In an unlikely double act at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, UK deputy prime minister David Lammy and former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak - separated in Westminster by one of the most bruising electoral defeats in Conservative history - shared a stage in New Delhi to argue that artificial intelligence is too consequential to be left to partisan instinct. The symbolism was deliberate. Lammy, who took charge of British foreign policy when Labour swept to power in July 2024, defeating Sunak's government, has preserved the broad architecture of his predecessor's AI agenda: the first global safety summit at Bletchley Park, the 2023 AI White Paper, and the sectoral regulatory framework that followed. Sunak, now a backbench MP, remains an undiminished evangelist for the technology he championed in office. In New Delhi, at least, the argument ran in one direction. Lammy called the current moment "the most extraordinary year" in the India-UK relationship, one anchored by a new trade deal and an announcement that nine British universities would open campuses in India. On talent, he was characteristically direct. "Last month, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said she wants to attract the top AI talent in the world, and India is at the top of that list," he said. Simplified visa pathways, he added, are central to making that ambition real. The New Delhi Frontier AI Impact commitments to emerge from the summit reflect two interlocking priorities. The first is the collection of real-world AI usage data - anonymised for privacy - to inform policymaking on jobs, skills and workforce transitions. The second is the development of multilingual, culturally contextualised evaluation frameworks for AI systems, with particular attention to the Global South. Lammy was pointed about India's role in shaping that agenda. "Very grateful to India for centering the Global South. The face of the average worker in the global South, in a very rural community - and the huge opportunities there are in agriculture - AI is making that difference," he said. Lindy Cameron CB OBE, the British High Commissioner, reinforced that direction in a conversation with HT. She pointed to the India-UK Joint Centre for AI and the India-UK Connectivity and Innovation Centre as the structural vehicles for building more inclusive AI ecosystems, and flagged a new partnership announced at the summit - aimed at helping doctors diagnose faster, teachers personalise learning and businesses develop the next generation of jobs. "You can take cutting-edge tech and solve global challenges," she said, "but it has to be done securely, safely and responsibly, for massive global impact." Beyond geopolitics, both men were drawn to a subtler argument - that AI's most consequential impact may not be economic at all. Sunak pointed to Britain's long-standing life sciences advantage, a tradition stretching back to Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA's double helix structure, and argued that its intersection with AI is now producing something genuinely new. "With our strength in artificial intelligence, because these two things have come together, we're now doing drug discovery in a completely different way," he said. The context is sobering: as many as 95% of drug experiments historically fail to yield usable results. Sunak framed the India-UK opportunity in terms that went beyond the bilateral. "Much as we talk about economic growth with AI, being able to solve some of those really profound challenges - and improve our health and wellness - is the most exciting opportunity. When I look at India, with similar strength in healthcare and AI, it feels a pretty obvious way for us to collaborate." For two countries with deep research ecosystems and large, diverse patient populations, this is not aspiration - it is strategy. The conversation also confronted the structural facts of AI geopolitics. Lammy acknowledged what has become the dominant frame: the US and China as twin poles of model development, chip manufacturing and compute infrastructure, with most other nations navigating the space between them. Both India and the UK, he suggested, are doing so with a shared emphasis on sovereign capability rather than dependency. Britain established a Sovereign AI Unit last year, backed by £500 million and aligned with its AI Opportunities Action Plan. The objective is to build indigenous data, compute and talent pipelines - while working alongside frontier firms including Anthropic, Nvidia and OpenAI to ensure that national capability is not simply a function of access to foreign platforms. Sunak reached for history to make the deeper point. "Every time there's been one of these big technological revolutions, it isn't necessarily the country that invents the technology that benefits the most from it," he said, citing the printing press - developed in Mainz around 1440 - and the way European nations that did not originate it ultimately extracted greater advantage through more open regulatory and institutional conditions. The implication for AI is uncomfortable but clear: invention is not destiny. Britain's regulatory philosophy is built around that lesson. Its sectoral model - in which individual regulators shape AI governance within their own domains rather than deferring to a central authority - rests on five principles from the 2023 White Paper: safety, security and robustness; transparency and explainability; fairness; accountability and governance; and contestability and redress. A statutory framework targeting frontier model risks is now expected in 2026....