As national leaders and global entrepreneurs gather here this week for the India AI Impact Summit (February 16-20) to debate the impact of Artificial Intelligence on “people, planet, and progress”, the mix of anxiety and anticipation is hard to miss.

The spectacular rise in AI‑driven tech valuations over the last few years has just collided with a sharp correction in global markets. Predictions of massive job losses, in a sweeping range of white-collar sectors, from software and finance to law and realty, sit uneasily beside expansive claims that AI will generate such extraordinary wealth that work itself may become optional.

The promise of liberation from drudgery is shadowed by the fear, triggered most recently by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, that AI could instead enslave humanity. Opus 4.6 is specifically designed for complex, agent-driven, and enterprise-level workflows.

Yet behind these confusing headlines lies a deeper question: how to interpret the meaning of the AI revolution and its implications for global order.

Varied perspectives 

Three  books — by Yanis Varoufakis, Alex Karp, and the late diplomat Henry Kissinger — offer sharply different answers and, between them, pointers for India to the road ahead.

Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, warns that we are entering an era of “digital feudalism”. Karp, the head of Palantir, argues that democracies must harness technology to survive intensifying geopolitical rivalry. And Kissinger, in his final work, suggests that AI may transform humanity’s relationship with knowledge and power itself.

In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Varoufakis challenges the assumption that AI is ushering in a more advanced form of capitalism. He argues instead that the rise of digital platforms marks a regression away from capitalism. These platforms, he says, have replaced competitive markets with privately governed digital estates. Humanity is being reduced to digital serfdom while platform owners extract “rent” from online activity much like feudal lords extracted rent from land.

For emerging powers such as India, Varoufakis’s thesis raises uncomfortable questions. Can digital sovereignty be preserved in a world where global platforms are overwhelmingly based in just two countries — United States and China? Can a democratic India live with digital feudalism? Whether or not one accepts the term “technofeudalism”, Varoufakis forces us to confront the concentration of digital power and the political consequences of its exercise.

If Varoufakis sees danger in corporate dominance, Alex Karp sees danger in strategic complacency. In The Technological Republic, Karp criticises Silicon Valley for its deliberate distancing from the state and its fixation on consumer‑facing innovation. He argues that technology firms must rediscover a sense of national purpose and collaborate with governments. He invokes the Manhattan Project and the Internet as examples of how state-technology partnerships once shaped the global order by heralding the atomic age and global digital connectivity.

Karp insists that in a world of sharpening competition with China, for liberal democracies, technological development is inseparable from national security. States that fail to integrate technological innovation into strategy, he warns, risk losing influence — or worse.

Karp’s argument should resonate in India, where its “developmental state” led the pursuit of advanced technologies after Independence. But Delhi’s long‑standing reliance on state tech monopolies and its reluctance to allow private capital a central role in technological development meant that it steadily lost ground.

Delhi now appears ready to correct that course, if tentatively. Yet, it remains some distance from fully trusting the instincts of the private sector to drive technological innovation. India’s tech entrepreneurs, meanwhile, are only beginning to grasp the scale of the opportunity before them.

In The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, published shortly before Kissinger’s death, Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher argue that AI represents a “third way of knowing”, distinct from faith and reason.

AI systems detect patterns and generate insights without relying on human‑designed theories or causal explanations. This challenges long‑standing assumptions about the special gift of human reasoning, knowledge generation and its application.

They argue that AI is not merely another technological breakthrough — it is a civilizational rupture. The authors contend that in preserving human agency and global stability, societies must consciously shape the role of AI rather than allow it to evolve unchecked.

For India, the stakes are unusually high. As a “catch‑up state”, India’s central goal is to close the gap with the developed world in terms of power and prosperity. Delhi sees AI as a historic opportunity to accelerate growth, expand state capacity, and leapfrog technological stages that took advanced economies decades to build.

But India must also navigate the tension between regulation and innovation, safety and development. For now, Delhi is not emulating Europe’s regulation‑heavy approach, nor is it embracing Trump’s model of letting tech capital develop AI without any fetters.

India is attempting to craft a middle path — one that will be easy to state but hard to delineate in actual policymaking.

This balancing act will shape India’s AI trajectory in the coming decades. The choices Delhi makes — on finding the right balance between state and capital, and between international cooperation and the development of sovereign capabilities — will determine whether India can leverage AI for national renewal or let its past policy inhibitions drive the nation towards suboptimal outcomes.

C Raja Mohan is a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express. He is also associated with the Motwani‑Jadeja Institute of American Studies, Jindal Global University, and the Council for Strategic and Defense Research