UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the India AI Impact Summit 2026 that the future of AI must not be determined by a small group of nations or controlled by powerful private actors. He praised India’s leadership in hosting what he described as the first AI summit in the Global South.
Guterres said AI is transforming economies, societies, and governance at unprecedented speed. Inclusive and globally representative governance frameworks are essential to ensure equitable access and responsible deployment, he added.
‘The future of AI cannot be decided by a handful of countries or left to the whims of a few billionaires,’ he said, urging multilateral cooperation. Real impact, he added, means technology that improves lives and protects the planet.
United Nations officials say AI could help accelerate progress on nearly 80 per cent of the Sustainable Development Goals. Potential applications include reducing inequalities, strengthening public services, and enhancing climate action.
The UN has committed to a proactive, human rights-based approach to AI adoption within its own system. Agencies are deploying AI tools to address bias in data models, improve analytics, support innovation, and safeguard ethical standards.
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The chief executive of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, has said India can play a central role in guiding global responses to the security and economic risks linked to AI.
Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, he argued that the world’s largest democracy is well placed to become a partner and leader in shaping the responsible development of advanced systems.
Amodei explained that Anthropic hopes to work with India on the testing and evaluation of models for safety and security. He stressed growing concern over autonomous behaviours that may emerge in advanced systems and noted the possibility of misuse by individuals or governments.
He pointed to the work of international and national AI safety institutes as a foundation for joint efforts and added that the economic effect of AI will be significant and that India and the wider Global South could benefit if policymakers prepare early.
Through its Economic Futures programme and Economic Index, Anthropic studies how AI reshapes jobs and labour markets.
He said the company intends to expand information sharing with Indian authorities and bring economists, labour groups, and officials into regular discussions to guide evidence-based policy instead of relying on assumptions.
Amodei said AI is set to increase economic output and that India is positioned to influence emerging global frameworks. He signalled a strong interest in long-term cooperation that supports safety, security, and sustainable growth.
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The European Central Bank (ECB) has joined forces with Spain’s ONCE Foundation to ensure the digital euro app is accessible to all citizens, including people with disabilities, older adults, and those with limited digital skills.
The partnership focuses on technical advice, design collaboration, and testing prototypes for accessibility.
ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone said accessibility is a core principle of the digital euro, designed to empower all citizens in the digital age. ONCE Foundation Director Jesús Hernández Galán said experts with lived disability experience are helping make the digital euro app practical and user-friendly.
The collaboration supports an ‘accessibility by design’ approach, going beyond minimum legal requirements under the European Accessibility Act.
Features under consideration include voice-controlled transactions, large-font displays, guided onboarding, and multiple support options to ensure clarity, simplicity, and control for users less confident with digital tools.
Public input will also shape the app’s development, with focus groups and vulnerable consumer feedback guiding design choices. The partnership follows European accessibility and digital regulations, promoting a user-friendly and inclusive digital euro for all.
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Narendra Modi presented the new MANAV Vision during the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, setting out a human-centred direction for AI.
He described the framework as rooted in moral guidance, transparent oversight, national control of data, inclusive access and lawful verification. He argued that the approach is intended to guide global AI governance for the benefit of humanity.
The Prime Minister of India warned that rapid technological change requires stronger safeguards and drew attention to the need to protect children. He also said societies are entering a period where people and intelligent systems co-create and evolve together instead of functioning in separate spheres.
He pointed to India’s confidence in its talent and policy clarity as evidence of a growing AI future.
Modi announced that three domestic companies introduced new AI models and applications during the summit, saying the launches reflect the energy and capability of India’s young innovators.
He invited technology leaders from around the world to collaborate by designing and developing in India instead of limiting innovation to established hubs elsewhere.
The summit brought together policymakers, academics, technologists and civil society representatives to encourage cooperation on the societal impact of artificial intelligence.
As the first global AI summit held in the Global South, the gathering aligned with India’s national commitment to welfare for all and the wider aspiration to advance AI for humanity.
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At an AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a prominent AI safety advocate, said the ongoing AI arms race between big tech companies carries ‘existential risk’ that could ultimately threaten humanity if super-intelligent AI systems overpower human control.
He argued that while CEOs of leading AI developers, whom he believes privately recognise the dangers, are reluctant to slow development unilaterally due to investor pressure, governments could work together to impose collective regulation and safety standards.
Russell characterised the current trajectory as akin to ‘Russian roulette’ with humanity’s future and urged political action to address both safety and ethical concerns around AI advancement.
He also highlighted other societal issues tied to rapid AI deployment, including potential job losses, surveillance concerns and misuse. He pointed to growing public unease, especially among younger people, about AI’s dehumanising aspects.
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Microsoft has announced it is on pace to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to expand AI access across the Global South, speaking at the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi. The company said AI usage in the Global North is roughly double that of the Global South, with the gap widening.
In India and other regions of the Global South, Microsoft is increasing investment in data centre infrastructure, connectivity and electricity to support AI deployment. The company reported more than $8 billion invested in infrastructure serving the Global South in its last fiscal year.
Microsoft is also expanding skills and education programmes in India, including a pledge to help 20 million people gain AI credentials by 2028 and a target to equip 20 million people in India with AI skills by 2030.
Additional initiatives focus on multilingual AI development, food security projects in Kenya and across Sub-Saharan Africa, and new data tools to measure AI diffusion. Microsoft said coordinated global partnerships are essential to ensure AI benefits reach countries in the Global South.
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The European Commission has proposed changes to the GDPR and the EU AI Act as part of its Digital Omnibus Package, seeking to clarify how personal data may be processed for AI development and operation across the EU.
A new provision would recognise AI development and operation as a potential legitimate interest under the GDPR, subject to necessity and a balancing test. Controllers in the EU would still need to demonstrate safeguards, including data minimisation, transparency and an unconditional right to object.
The package also introduces a proposed legal ground for processing sensitive data in AI systems where removal is not feasible without disproportionate effort. Claims that strict conditions would apply, requiring technical protections and documentation throughout the lifecycle of AI models in the EU.
Further amendments would permit biometric data processing for identity verification under defined conditions and expand the rules allowing sensitive data to be used for bias detection beyond high-risk AI systems.
Overall, the proposals aim to provide greater legal certainty without overturning existing data protection principles. The EU lawmakers and supervisory authorities continue to debate the proposals before any final adoption.
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Anthropic and the Government of Rwanda have signed a three-year Memorandum of Understanding to expand AI deployment across health, education and public sector services in Rwanda. The agreement marks Anthropic’s first multi-sector government partnership in Africa.
In Rwanda’s health system, Anthropic will support national priorities, including efforts to eliminate cervical cancer and reduce malaria and maternal mortality. Rwanda’s Ministry of Health will work with Anthropic to integrate AI tools aligned with national objectives.
Public sector developer teams in Rwanda will gain access to Claude and Claude Code, alongside training, API credits and technical support. The partnership also formalises an education programme launched in 2025 that provided 2,000 Claude Pro licences to educators in Rwanda.
Officials in Rwanda have said the collaboration focuses on capacity development, responsible deployment and local autonomy. Anthropic stated that investment in skills and infrastructure in Rwanda aims to enable safe and independent use of AI by teachers, health workers and public servants.
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Derived from the Latin word ‘superanus’, through the French word ‘souveraineté’, sovereignty can be understood as: ‘the ultimate overseer, or authority, in the decision-making process of the state and in the maintenance of order’ – Britannica. Digital sovereignty, specifically European digital sovereignty, refers to ‘Europe’s ability to act independently in the digital world’.
In 2020, the European Parliament already identified the consequences of reliance on non-EU technologies. From the economic and social influence of non-EU technology companies, which can undermine user control over their personal data, to the slow growth of the EU technology companies and a limitation on the enforcement of European laws.
Today, these concerns persist. From Romanian election interference on TikTok’s platform, Microsoft’s interference with the ICC, to the Dutch government authentication platform being acquired by a US firm, and booming American and Chinese LLMs compared to European LLMs. The EU is at a crossroads between international reliance and homegrown adoption.
The issue of the EU digital sovereignty has gained momentum in the context of recent and significant shifts in US foreign policy toward its allies. In this environment, the pursuit of the EU digital sovereignty appears as a justified and proportionate response, one that might previously have been perceived as unnecessarily confrontational.
In light of this, this analysis’s main points will discuss the rationale behind the EU digital sovereignty (including dependency, innovation and effective compliance), recent European-centric technological and platform shifts, the steps the EU is taking to successfully be digitally sovereign and finally, examples of European alternatives
Rationale behind the move
The reasons for digital sovereignty can be summed up in three main areas: (I) less dependency on non-EU tech, (ii) leading and innovating technological solutions, and (iii) ensuring better enforcement and subsequent adherence to data protection laws/fundamental rights.
(i) Less dependency: Global geopolitical tensions between US-China/Russia push Europe towards developing its own digital capabilities and secure its supply chains. Insecure supply chain makes Europe vulnerable to failing energy grids.
More recently, US giant Microsoft threatened the International legal order by revoking US-sanctioned International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan’s Microsoft software access, preventing the Chief Prosecutor from working on his duties at the ICC. In light of these scenarios, Europeans are turning to developing more European-based solutions to reduce upstream dependencies.
(ii) Leaders & innovators: A common argument is that Americans innovate, the Chinese copy, and the Europeans regulate. If the EU aims to be a digital geopolitical player, it must position itself to be a regulator which promotes innovation. It can achieve this by upskilling its workforce of non-digital trades into digital ones to transform its workforce, have more EU digital infrastructure (data centres, cloud storage and management software), further increase innovation spending and create laws that truly allow for the uptake of EU technological development instead of relying on alternative, cheaper non-EU options.
(iii) Effective compliance: Knowing that fines are more difficult to enforce towards non-EU companies than the EU companies (ex., Clearview AI), EU-based technological organisations would allow for corrective measures, warnings, and fines to be enforced more effectively. Thus, enabling more adherence towards the EU’s digital agenda and respect for fundamental rights.
Can the EU achieve Digital Sovereignty?
The main speed bumps towards the EU digital sovereignty are: i) a lack of digital infrastructure (cloud storage & data centres), ii) (critical) raw material dependency and iii) Legislative initiatives to facilitate the path towards digital sovereignty (innovation procurement and fragmented compliance regime).
i) lack of digital infrastructure: In order for the EU to become digitally sovereign it must have its own sovereign digital infrastructure.
In practice, the EU relies heavily on American data centre providers (i.e. Equinix, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services) hosted in the EU. In this case, even though the data is European and hosted in the EU, the company that hosts it is non-European. This poses reliance and legislative challenges, such as ensuring adequate technical and organisational measures to protect personal data when it is in transit to the US. Given the EU-US DPF, there is a legal basis for transferring EU personal data to the US.
However, if the DPF were to be struck down (perhaps due to the US’ Cloud Act), as it has been in the past (twice with Schrems I and Schrems II) and potentially Schrems III, there would no longer be a legal basis for the transfer of the EU personal data to a US data centre.
Previously, the EU’s 2022 Directive on critical entities resilience allowed for the EU countries to identify critical infrastructure and subsequently ensure they take the technical, security and organisational measures to assure their resilience. Part of this Directive covers digital infrastructure, including providers of cloud computing services and providers of data centres. From this, the EU has recently developed guidelines for member states to identify critical entities. However, these guidelines do not anticipate how to achieve resilience and leave this responsibility with member states.
ii) Raw material dependency: The EU cannot be digitally sovereign until it reduces some of its dependencies on other countries’ raw materials to build the hardware necessary to be technologically sovereign. In 2025, the EU’s goals were to create a new roadmap towards critical raw material (CRM) sovereignty to rely on its own energy sources and build infrastructure.
Thus, the RESourceEU Action Plan was born in December 2025. This plan contains 6 pillars: securing supply through knowledge, accelerating and promoting projects, using the circular economy and fostering innovation (recycling products which contain CRMs), increasing European demand for European projects (stockpiling CRMs), protecting the single market and partnering with third countries for long-lasting diversification. Practically speaking, part of this plan is to match Europe and or global raw material supply with European demand for European projects.
iii) Legislative initiatives to facilitate the path towards digital sovereignty:
Tackling difficult innovation procurement: the argument is to facilitate its uptake of innovation procurement across the EU. In 2026, the EU is set to reform its public procurement framework for innovation. The Innovation Procurement Update (IPU) team has representatives from over 33 countries (predominantly through law firms, Bird & Bird being the most represented), which recommends that innovation procurement reach 20% of all public procurement.
Another recommendation would help more costly innovative solutions to be awarded procurement projects, which in the past were awarded to cheaper procurement bids. In practice, the lowest price of a public procurement bid is preferred, and if it meets the remaining procurement conditions, it wins the bid – but de-prioritising this non-pricing criterion would enable companies with more costly innovative solutions to win public procurement bids.
Alleviating compliance challenges: lowering other compliance burdens whilst maintaining the digital aquis: recently announced at the World Economic Forum by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, EU.inc would help cross-border business operations scaling up by alleviating company, corporate, insolvency, labour and taxation law compliance burdens. By harmonising these into a single framework, businesses can more easily grow and deploy cross-border solutions that would otherwise face hurdles.
Power through data: another legislative measure to help facilitate the path towards the EU digital sovereignty is unlocking the potential behind European data. In order to research innovative solutions, data is required. This can be achieved through personal or non-personal data. The EU’s GDPR regulates personal data and is currently undergoing amendments. If the proposed changes to the GDPR are approved, i.e. a broadening of its scope, data that used to be considered personal (and thus required GDPR compliance) could be deemed non-personal and used more freely for research purposes. The Data Act regulate the reuse and re-sharing of non-personal data. It aims to simplify and bolster the fair reuse of non-personal data. Overall, both personal and non-personal data can give important insight that research can benefit from in developing European innovative sovereign solutions.
European alternatives
European companies have already built a network of European platforms, services and apps with European values at heart:
Category
Currently Used
EU Alternative
Comments
Social media
TikTok, X, Instagram
Monnet (Luxembourg)
‘W’ (Sweden)
Monnet is a social media app prioritises connections and non-addictive scrolling. Recently announced ‘W’ replaces ‘X’ and is gaining major traction with non-advertising models at its heart.
Email
Microsoft’s Outlook and Google’s gmail
Tuta (mail/calendar), Proton (Germany), Mailbox (Germany), Mailfence (Belgium)
Replace email and calendar apps with a privacy focused business model.
Search engine
Google Search and DuckDuckGo
Qwant (France) and Ecosia (German)
Qwant has focused on privacy since its launch in 2013. Ecosia is an ecofriendly focused business model which helps plant trees when users search
Video conferencing
Microsoft Teams and Slack a
Visio (France), Wire (Switzerland, Mattermost (US but self hosted), Stackfield (Germany), Nextcloud Talk (Germany) and Threema (Switzerland)
These alternatives are end-to-end encrypted. Visio is used by the French Government
Writing tools
Microsoft’s Word & Excel and Google Sheets, Notion
Most of these options provide cloud storage and NexCloud is a recurring alternative across categories.
Finance
Visa and Mastercard
Wero (EU)
Not only will it provide an EU wide digital wallet option, but it will replace existing national options – providing for fast adoption.
LLM
OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek’s LLM
Mistral AI (France) and DeepL (Germany)
DeepL is already wildly used and Mistral is more transparent with its partially open-source model and ease of reuse for developers
Hardware
Semi conductors: ASML (Dutch) Data Center: GAIA-X (Belgium)
ASML is a chip powerhouse for the EU and GAIA-X set an example of EU based data centres with it open-source federated data infrastructure.
A dedicated website called ‘European Alternatives’ provides exactly what it says, European Alternatives. A list with over 50 categories and 100 alternatives
Conclusion
In recent years, the Union’s policy goals have shifted towards overt digital sovereignty solutions through diversification of materials and increased innovation spending, combined with a restructuring of the legislative framework to create the necessary path towards European digital infrastructure.
Whilst this analysis does not include all speed bumps, nor avenues towards the road of the EU digital sovereignty, it sheds light on the EU’s most recent major policy developments. Key questions remain regarding data reuse, its impact on data protection fundamental rights and whether this reshaping of the framework will yield the intended results.
Therefore, how will the EU tread whilst it becomes a more coherent sovereign geopolitical player?
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Ericsson and Microsoft have integrated advanced 5G into Windows 11 to simplify secure enterprise laptop connectivity. The update embeds AI-driven 5G management, enabling IT teams to automate connections and enforce policy-based controls at scale.
The solution combines Microsoft Intune with Ericsson Enterprise 5G Connect, a cloud-based platform that monitors network quality and optimises performance. Enterprises can switch service providers and automatically apply internal connectivity policies.
IT departments can remotely provision eSIMs, prioritise 5G networks, and enforce secure profiles across laptop fleets. Automation reduces manual configuration and ensures consistent compliance across locations and service providers.
The companies say the integration addresses long-standing barriers to adopting cellular-connected PCs, including complexity and fragmented management. Multi-market pilots have preceded commercial availability in the United States, Sweden, Singapore, and Japan.
Additional launches are planned in 2026 across Spain, Germany, and Finland. Executives from both firms describe the collaboration as a step toward AI-ready enterprise devices with secure, always-on connectivity.
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