The buffet is cleared. The delegates are heading for the airport with their commemorative brass elephants and a fresh layer of jet lag. After three days of high-stakes posturing in New Delhi, 85 countries have finally put their names to a document they’re calling a "unified vision" for the future of artificial intelligence.

It’s a nice thought. It’s also mostly theater.

The New Delhi Declaration is exactly what you’d expect from a room full of bureaucrats trying to catch a runaway train. It’s a 25-page PDF filled with promises to be "responsible" and "inclusive." It avoids the hard stuff. It skips the parts that would actually hurt a bottom line. If you’ve read any of the previous communiqués from London or Seoul, you know the drill. It’s a high-protein diet of "risk mitigation" and "shared prosperity" without a single calorie of enforcement.

The core of the friction—the thing they didn't want to talk about over the gala dinner—is the "Compute Gap."

While the US and China are busy stockpiling H100s like they’re Cold War warheads, the rest of the world is asking for a seat at the table. India, leading the charge for the Global South, pushed hard for a sovereign AI fund. They wanted a $100 billion pool of capital to help developing nations build their own data centers. They didn't get it. Instead, they got a "voluntary knowledge-sharing framework."

That’s diplomatic speak for a Google Drive folder full of white papers.

Let’s be real. There’s a massive trade-off happening here that nobody wants to say out loud. You can have safety or you can have speed, but you can’t have both when the people building the tools are the ones writing the rules. The declaration talks a big game about "open-source collaboration," but the reality is a lot grimmer. Companies like OpenAI and Google are increasingly locking their weights behind digital vaults, citing "existential risk."

It’s a convenient excuse. If you convince the world that your math is a biological weapon, you don't have to share it with the competition.

The summit tried to tackle the "alignment" problem, too. That’s the industry term for making sure a chatbot doesn’t tell a teenager how to manufacture sarin gas or convince a lonely guy to jump off a bridge. The 85 signatories agreed to establish a "Global Safety Network." This sounds impressive until you realize it has no budget, no subpoena power, and no ability to stop a company from hitting "deploy." It’s a neighborhood watch program for a wildfire.

Then there’s the price tag. The energy requirements for the next generation of these models are staggering. We’re talking about a carbon footprint that could swallow small nations. The declaration mentions "sustainable growth" in passing, but it doesn't address the fact that we’re currently burning through the grid to generate pictures of cats in space and slightly better marketing emails.

The friction isn't just about who gets the chips; it’s about who pays for the power. One delegate from a Southeast Asian nation told me off the record that the Western obsession with "AI ethics" feels a lot like a new kind of protectionism. If you can’t compete on tech, you compete on regulation. You make the compliance costs so high that only the giants can survive.

It’s a clever move. It keeps the market tidy.

By the end of the week, the tension between the "builders" and the "regulators" was vibrating in the air. The US wants to protect its giants. The EU wants to fine them. The Global South just wants to be able to run a basic LLM without paying a tax to Silicon Valley. 85 signatures don't change that math. It just puts a shiny veneer on a very messy, very expensive scramble for dominance.

The New Delhi Declaration will be filed away. It’ll be cited in future speeches and used as a footnote in academic papers about the era of digital anxiety. It’s a map of a territory that is changing faster than the cartographers can draw.

As the private jets take off from Indira Gandhi International, one thing is certain: the code doesn't care about the declaration. The models are still training. The servers are still humming. The power is still being sucked out of the earth.

If everyone at the summit agreed on the path forward, why does it feel like we're all still sprinting in opposite directions?