---
type: source
title: "What Got Lost in the Global AI Summit Circuit?"
author: "Brookings Institution"
url: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-got-lost-in-the-global-ai-summit-circuit/
date: 2026-04-02
domain: grand-strategy
secondary_domains: []
format: article
status: unprocessed
priority: medium
tags: [ai-summits, governance-laundering, civil-society-exclusion, industry-capture, India-AI-summit, international-governance, form-substance-divergence]
---

## Content

The India AI Impact Summit claimed to democratize the global AI conversation. The authors argue that civil society participation and meaningful governance discussions were lost despite impressive metrics.

**Structural exclusions:**
- Civil society organizations physically excluded from main summit discussions while tech CEOs had prominent speaking slots
- Timing conflicts (Chinese Lunar New Year, Ramadan) prevented important stakeholders from attending
- Critical discussions on women and AI ethics were "left for the last day, last session, in a far-off room"

**Governance shortcomings:**
- "Industry capture over shared terminology" — corporations shaped how "sovereignty" and "regulation" are defined in governance language
- Rather than advancing genuine accountability, the summit prioritized "innovation and the projection of national AI champions"
- Concepts like "solidarity" from earlier summits "fully sidelined"

**Headline metric vs. substance:** 600,000 participants — impressive attendance masking exclusionary agenda dominated by private corporate interests.

**Core issue (per authors):** "Without civil society in the room, words lose their meaning."

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** This is governance laundering in the summit circuit itself — impressive scale (600,000 participants) masking industry capture of governance language. The pattern is not just form-substance divergence in treaty texts; it's form-substance divergence in the deliberative processes that produce governance proposals. When civil society is excluded from the room where governance terminology is defined, the governance form (inclusive global AI summit) conceals the substance (industry-defined regulatory language).

**What surprised me:** The linguistic capture mechanism — corporations defining what "sovereignty" and "regulation" mean in governance contexts. This is not brute opposition to governance; it's subtle linguistic colonization of governance terminology. When "sovereignty" means "national AI champions," it actively undermines international coordination.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Evidence that earlier summits (Bletchley, Seoul) avoided this civil society exclusion pattern. The article implies degradation over the summit sequence — earlier summits included "solidarity" language that has since been sidelined.

**KB connections:**
- [[formal-coordination-mechanisms-require-narrative-objective-function-specification]] — this is what happens when the objective function is not specified: industry fills the vacuum with its own
- Multi-level governance laundering synthesis — the summit process itself is a level of governance laundering
- [[governance-coordination-speed-scales-with-number-of-enabling-conditions-present]] — 0 of 4 enabling conditions met by AI summit process

**Extraction hints:**
1. ENRICHMENT: Multi-level governance laundering synthesis should add the deliberative process layer — it's not just treaties and regulations but the summit deliberation process itself
2. CLAIM CANDIDATE: "Industry capture of AI governance terminology (defining 'sovereignty' as 'national AI champions,' sidelining 'solidarity') operates through civil society exclusion from summit deliberation, making governance form (global participation metrics) conceal substantive industry capture" (confidence: experimental, domain: grand-strategy)
3. The summit sequence degrade (Bletchley → Seoul → India) suggests a historical pattern: early summits had more civil society inclusion, each subsequent summit includes less. This could be tested against the enabling conditions framework — do early summits have different enabling conditions than late ones?

## Curator Notes
PRIMARY CONNECTION: Multi-level governance laundering synthesis (Session 04-06) + [[formal-coordination-mechanisms-require-narrative-objective-function-specification]]
WHY ARCHIVED: Summit governance laundering adds a deliberative process level — the governance language is captured before it enters treaties and regulations. This is upstream governance laundering.
EXTRACTION HINT: The linguistic capture mechanism (corporations defining governance terminology) is more analytically tractable than the exclusion metric. Focus on how industry-defined "sovereignty" prevents international coordination rather than on the attendance numbers.
