Diplomacy is mostly high-stakes theater. We watch the handshakes, listen to the rehearsed platitudes, and try to ignore the smell of desperation in the room. This week’s performance features Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake. He’s leaning into a very specific, very modern script: the "trusted AI" pitch.

Dissanayake just flagged India as a "natural collaborator" for building inclusive, trusted artificial intelligence. At the same time, he’s nodding toward India’s security interests in the Indian Ocean. It’s a classic two-step. He’s offering a digital alliance in exchange for regional stability, or perhaps just to keep the neighbors from getting too twitchy about who else is docking in Colombo’s ports.

Let’s be real. Terms like "inclusive AI" are usually just polite ways of saying "we can’t afford to do this alone." For a country like Sri Lanka, still reeling from a debt crisis that saw inflation hit 70 percent not too long ago, "trusted" tech isn’t about ethics. It’s about infrastructure. It’s about not getting locked into a proprietary ecosystem they can’t exit.

India, meanwhile, is trying to position itself as the "Vishwa Mitra" or the world’s friend in the tech space. They want to be the alternative to the Silicon Valley-Beijing duopoly. They’ve got the engineers. They’ve got the data. What they don't have is a clear, friction-free backyard. That’s where Dissanayake’s second point comes in. You don’t get to talk about Large Language Models without talking about submarines.

The Indian Ocean is a mess of underwater data cables and geopolitical posturing. For years, New Delhi has been losing sleep over Chinese "research" vessels—ships like the Yuan Wang 5—showing up in Sri Lankan waters. These aren't just fishing boats. They’re floating surveillance hubs capable of tracking satellites and, more importantly, mapping the very seabed where the internet lives.

By acknowledging India’s security interests, Dissanayake is basically signaling a "Cloud First, China Second" policy. It’s a trade-off. Sri Lanka gets access to India’s growing tech stack—the "India Stack" that’s made digital payments and identity verification look easy—and India gets a buffer zone against Chinese maritime creep.

But talk is cheap. Building "inclusive AI" requires massive amounts of compute. We’re talking thousands of H100 GPUs, the kind of hardware that costs $30,000 a pop and requires a power grid that doesn't blink when the air conditioning kicks on. Sri Lanka’s energy grid isn't exactly a marvel of modern engineering. They’ve spent the last few years dealing with rolling blackouts. You can’t train a model on a dead battery.

Then there’s the "trust" factor. In the tech world, "trusted" is usually code for "we won't steal your IP, and we won't turn off the switch if you disagree with our foreign policy." For India, that’s a hard brand to build while they’re still figuring out their own domestic data protection laws. For Sri Lanka, "trust" is a luxury they’re trying to buy with geopolitical capital.

Dissanayake is a pragmatist. He’s a leader from a Marxist-leaning background who’s suddenly finding himself playing the ultimate capitalist game: tech sovereignty. He knows that if Sri Lanka doesn’t tether itself to a regional power, it’ll just be a passive consumer of whatever black-box algorithms the West or China decides to export.

But here’s the rub. India isn't exactly handing out free GPU credits. Any collaboration will come with strings—likely involving the Adani Group’s massive renewable energy projects in Sri Lanka or more "maritime security" pacts that look a lot like military oversight. The $442 million wind power project in Mannar is already a point of local friction. Tech collaboration isn't a separate lane; it’s the same old road with a new coat of paint.

We’re seeing a new kind of non-aligned movement. It’s not about staying out of the Cold War; it’s about picking the right server farm. Dissanayake is betting that the path to a "digital Sri Lanka" runs through New Delhi. It’s a calculated move to secure the borders by opening the data ports.

Is it possible to build an AI that is both "inclusive" and "trusted" while two nuclear-armed neighbors stare each other down over your coastline? It’s a nice thought for a press release. In reality, it’s just another day in the Indian Ocean, where the code is only as good as the navy protecting the cables.

How much "trust" can you actually bake into a silicon chip when the person across the table is checking the sonar readings?