India, Dec. 1 -- Recently I reviewed a policy briefing circulated by an international standards consortium and followed it with a long exchange of emails with regulators and practitioners. One line stood out: "Governance capacity now predicts AI productivity more reliably than research output." It was an understated sentence, but it captured a shift that has been accelerating quietly beneath the surface. The world is no longer defined by who builds the most advanced AI models - it is defined by who can govern them.

A deep inversion is underway in the global technology race. For most of the past decade, the contest centred on model size,compute access and elite talent. Now, the decisive factor is governance - the institutional machinery t...