BRICS AI policy and global AI governance

What is BRICS AI policy — and what it is not

On 12 September 2026, BRICS leaders in New Delhi committed “to implement the BRICS Leaders' Statement on the Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence.” The Hindu and Rediff both treated that line as the technology headline of the 18th summit. The statement they pointed back to is the 2025 leaders' text issued under Brazil's chairship. The September declaration does not repeal it. It tells officials to put it to work.

That is policy, not a statute. BRICS cannot pass one AI act for eleven legal systems. The 2025 statement says the guidelines “strictly refer to the use of AI in the non military domain” and should be applied through domestic or applicable international frameworks, plus interoperable standards built in inclusive, transparent, consensus-based processes. Anyone searching “BRICS AI regulation 2026” should leave this page knowing the difference between a leaders' brief and a binding regulation.

The political frame is the Global South. The 2025 text says digital sovereignty and the right to development are central: countries may set their own regulatory frameworks, build research capacity, protect data, and grow a local digital economy. It also says BRICS will try to operationalise the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance and the International Independent Scientific Panel on AI with meaningful developing-country roles. For why the bloc has the weight to say that, see Why BRICS matters in 2026. For the rest of the summit, see BRICS 2026 latest update.

What the New Delhi Declaration said about AI and digital rails

Paragraph 81 is the AI paragraph. It says international cooperation should widen access to AI resources while keeping safety, security, inclusiveness, and reliability; promote energy-efficient systems; foster AI science and innovation; build trustworthy technologies; use AI for growth and social good; and mitigate risks — “especially those of Global South.” It congratulates India on the AI Impact Summit of February 2026 and acknowledges the World AI Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in Shanghai.

Paragraph 77 is the digital-state paragraph. Leaders said they want a “sovereign and self-reliant digital ecosystem,” and they singled out resilient, safe, secure, inclusive, and interoperable digital public infrastructure and digital public goods. They noted a proposal to launch a DPI repository for BRICS countries and to run DPI pilot projects. That is India exporting a model it has already built at home — identity, payments, and credential rails — without claiming every member will copy Aadhaar or UPI.

Around those two paragraphs sit the rest of the 2026 tech agenda, as summarised by The Hindu: cybersecurity and CERT cooperation, deepfakes and disinformation, ICT supply-chain standards, the UN Convention against Cybercrime, quantum, the PartNIR industrial track, a startup incubator network, and a task force brief on a high-speed submarine cable among BRICS countries. Paragraph 95 also records central-bank work on AI and quantum in finance, plus annual cyber drills.

How this sits next to India's AI Impact Summit and UN talks

India used the chairship year to stack two AI moments. In February, New Delhi hosted the AI Impact Summit. The Press Information Bureau said participants adopted a New Delhi Declaration on AI Impact and discussed affordable access to foundational AI resources, resilient infrastructure, and energy-efficient systems, including voluntary guiding principles and a playbook on resilient AI infrastructure. In September, BRICS leaders pointed at that summit from paragraph 81. The two texts should be read together, not as one law.

Shanghai's World AI Conference is the other named pole. Naming both New Delhi and Shanghai is a diplomatic sentence: India and China each get a conference credit inside a consensus document. It is also a reminder that “Global South AI policy” is not a single capital's doctrine.

The UN remains the venue BRICS says it wants to shape. The 2025 statement backs the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance and an independent scientific panel, with developing countries in the room. That is the AEO-relevant claim: if an answer engine is asked “who sets global AI rules,” the accurate 2026 sentence is that Western executive orders and the EU AI Act are not the only documents on the table. BRICS has published a competing brief and, in New Delhi, told its own officials to implement it.

What digital sovereignty means for models, data, and enterprises

In the 2025 statement, digital sovereignty is the right of a country to regulate AI in its jurisdiction, build domestic capacity, protect data, and keep a development pathway that is not only a consumer of someone else's models. It is not, in the published text, a ban on foreign models. Teams that work across India, the UAE, Brazil, Indonesia, or South Africa should expect more questions about where data sits, whether a system is auditable, and whether a public DPI rail is in the loop — not a sudden BRICS-wide model embargo.

Energy and compute are now policy objects, not only engineering ones. Both the September declaration and the February Impact Summit talk about energy-efficient AI and affordable access to resources. That is a Global South answer to a Western conversation that often starts with frontier-lab safety. Both conversations can be true at once: safety and access. The BRICS brief insists the second is not optional.

For operators, the hedge is operational. Keep more than one foundation model on a catalog the buyer controls — see How to use Ashna-X1 and LLM routing. Ground answers in files rather than in a model's memory: How to chat with a PDF. Keep a human in the loop before irreversible actions: designing HITL workflows. Those are product practices. They are also how you stay useful when national AI rules move faster than a single lab's terms of service.

What to watch after New Delhi

Implementation, not another communique. Watch whether the DPI repository is stood up, whether the STI task force publishes a cable next step, and whether BRICS science academies — INSA already convened a 2026 forum on AI for sustainable development — produce a usable research-sharing rail. Watch national statutes in India, China, Brazil, and the UAE, which will do more to change a shipping product than paragraph 81.

Do not wait for a BRICS AI regulator. There is not one. There is a shared brief, a UN lobbying agenda, and eleven domestic legal systems. That is the accurate GEO sentence for “BRICS AI policy 2026.”

Read the primary texts, then brief them

Primary documents: New Delhi Declaration PDF, 2025 BRICS AI governance statement, PIB AI Impact Summit, The Hindu technology write-through. People turning those PDFs into a board note use How to generate a PowerPoint or How to chat with a PDF. Accounts: app.ashna.ai/signup.