20 Feb 2026

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Mozilla Privacy Blog: Behind the Velvet Rope: The AI Divide on Display at the India AI Impact Summit 2026

TLDR: No one could agree what 'sovereignty' means, but (almost) everyone agreed that AI cannot be controlled by a few dominant companies.

This past week, droves of AI experts and enthusiasts descended on New Delhi, bringing their own agendas, priorities, and roles in the debate to the table.

I scored high for my ability to move between cars, rickshaws and foot for transport (mostly thanks to colleagues), but low for being prepared with snacks. So, based on my tightly packed agenda combined with high hunger levels, here's my read out:

The same script, different reactions

As with any global summit, the host government made the most of having the eyes of the world and deep pockets of AI investors in town. While some press were critical of India seeking deals and investments, it wasn't notable - or outside of the norm.

What should be notable, and indeed were reflected in the voluntary agreements, were the key themes that drove conversations, including democratisation of AI, access to resources, and the vital role of open source to drive the benefits of AI. These topics were prominent in the Summit sessions and side events throughout the week.

In the name of innovation, regulation has become a faux pas

The EU has become a magnet for criticism given its recent attempts to regulate AI. I'm not going to debate this here, but it's clear that the EU AI Act (AIA) is being deployed and PRed quite expertly as a cautionary tale. While healthy debate around regulation is absolutely critical, much of the public commentary surrounding the AIA (and not just at this Summit) has been factually incorrect. Interrogate this reality by all means - we live in complex times - but it's hard not to see invalid criticisms as a strategic PR effort by those who philosophically (and financially) opposed governance. There is certainly plenty to question in the AIA, but the reality is much more nuanced than critics suggest.

What's more likely to kill a start up: the cost of compliance, or the concentration of market power in the hands of a few dominant players? It's true that regulation can absolutely create challenges. However, it is also worth looking at whether the greater obstacle is the control a small number of tech companies hold. A buy-out as an exit is great for many start-ups, but if that is now the most hopeful option, it raises important questions about the long-term health and competitiveness of the larger tech ecosystem.

A note of optimism: developing global frameworks on AI may still seem like a pipe dream in today's macro political climate, but ideas around like-minded powers working together and building trust makes me think that alignment beyond pure voluntary principles may be something we see grow. Frequent references to the Hiroshima Process as a middle ground were notable.

AI eats the world

There were pervasive assumptions that bigger - and then bigger still - is the inevitable direction of AI deployment, with hyperscale seen as the only viable path forward, in terms of inputs needed. However, the magnitude of what's required to fuel the current LLM-focused market structure met a global majority-focused reality: hyperscaling isn't sustainable. There were two primary camps at the Summit - the haves and the rest of us - and while the Summit brought them together, the gulf between them continues to grow.

Open source has to win

At the first AI Safety Summit in the UK, the concept of open source AI was vilified as a security risk. At the France AI Action Summit, the consensus began to shift meaningfully. At the India AI Impact Summit, we saw undeniable recognition of the vital role that open source plays in our collective AI future.

With proprietary systems, winning means owning. With open source approaches, winning means we're not just renting AI from a few companies and countries: we're working collectively to build, share, secure and inspect AI systems in the name of economic growth and the public interest. Before the Paris Summit, this was a difficult vision to push for, but after New Delhi, it's clear that open source is on the right side of history. Now, it's time for governments to build out their own strategies to promote and procure this approach.

Consolidation ≠ Competition

Global South discussions made one message clear: dependency orientated partnerships are not true partnerships and they're not a long term bet. Many countries are becoming more vocal that they want autonomy of their data and choice in their suppliers to lessen harmful impacts on citizens, and increase their impact to responsibly govern.

That is not today's reality.

I was, however, encouraged to find that attendees were far less starry-eyed over big tech than at previous Summits. The consensus agreed that it met no one's definition of sovereignty for a select few companies to own and control AI.

Despite agreement amongst the majority, addressing market concentration remained an elephant in the room. The narrative deployed against regulation became a blanket mantra, applied to anything from AI governance to competition action. However, it fails to address the fact that the AI market is already skewed toward a small number of powerful companies and traditional competition rules that act only after problems arise (and often through long legal processes) are not enough to keep up with fast-paced digital industries.

Some participants were downbeat and questioned if it was too late. The challenge is in demonstrating that it isn't. There is no single approach. But we know that concentration can be countered with a mix of technical and legal interventions. Options can be sweeping, or lighter touch and surgical in their focus. We are currently seeing is a wave of countries pass, draft, debate and consider new ex ante rules, providing learnings, data and inspiration.

It's important that we watch this space.

Whose safety are we talking about exactly?

The India AI Impact Summit has been criticised for letting safety discussions fall off the radar. That's not necessarily true. Instead of focusing on the view that AI is a cause for human annihilation, discussions focused on impacts that we can evidence now: on language, culture, bias, online safety, inclusion, and jobs.

Less headline-grabbing, less killer robots, far more human.

The path forward

It's difficult to know if these Summits will continue in the long term. There is a lot of fuss, expense, marketing, diplomacy, traffic and word salads involved. However, the opportunity to convene world leaders, businesses, builders, engineers, civil society and academics in one place, for what we are constantly reminded is a transformational technology, feels needed. Tracking progress on voluntary commitments over time might be illustrative. And while many of the top sessions are reserved for the few, witnessing the diverse debates this past week gives me hope that there is an opportunity for the greater voice to shape AI to be open, competitive and built for more than just the bottom line.

The post Behind the Velvet Rope: The AI Divide on Display at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

20 Feb 2026 8:47pm GMT

19 Feb 2026

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The Rust Programming Language Blog: Rust participates in Google Summer of Code 2026

We are happy to announce that the Rust Project will again be participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2026, same as in the previous two years. If you're not eligible or interested in participating in GSoC, then most of this post likely isn't relevant to you; if you are, this should contain some useful information and links.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an annual global program organized by Google that aims to bring new contributors to the world of open-source. The program pairs organizations (such as the Rust Project) with contributors (usually students), with the goal of helping the participants make meaningful open-source contributions under the guidance of experienced mentors.

The organizations that have been accepted into the program have been announced by Google. The GSoC applicants now have several weeks to discuss project ideas with mentors. Later, they will send project proposals for the projects that they found the most interesting. If their project proposal is accepted, they will embark on a several months long journey during which they will try to complete their proposed project under the guidance of an assigned mentor.

We have prepared a list of project ideas that can serve as inspiration for potential GSoC contributors that would like to send a project proposal to the Rust organization. However, applicants can also come up with their own project ideas. You can discuss project ideas or try to find mentors in the #gsoc Zulip stream. We have also prepared a proposal guide that should help you with preparing your project proposals. We would also like to bring your attention to our GSoC AI policy.

You can start discussing the project ideas with Rust Project mentors and maintainers immediately, but you might want to keep the following important dates in mind:

If you are interested in contributing to the Rust Project, we encourage you to check out our project idea list and send us a GSoC project proposal! Of course, you are also free to discuss these projects and/or try to move them forward even if you do not intend to (or cannot) participate in GSoC. We welcome all contributors to Rust, as there is always enough work to do.

Our GSoC contributors were quite successful in the past two years (2024, 2025), so we are excited what this year's GSoC will bring! We hope that participants in the program can improve their skills, but also would love for this to bring new contributors to the Project and increase the awareness of Rust in general. Like last year, we expect to publish blog posts in the future with updates about our participation in the program.

19 Feb 2026 12:00am GMT

18 Feb 2026

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This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 639

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tag us at @thisweekinrust.bsky.social on Bluesky or @ThisWeekinRust on mastodon.social, or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub and archives can be viewed at this-week-in-rust.org. If you find any errors in this week's issue, please submit a PR.

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Updates from Rust Community

Official
Newsletters
Project/Tooling Updates
Observations/Thoughts
Rust Walkthroughs
Miscellaneous

Crate of the Week

This week's crate is banish, a proc macro to build rule-driven state machines using a declarative DSL.

Thanks to Logan Flaherty for the self-suggestion!

Please submit your suggestions and votes for next week!

Calls for Testing

An important step for RFC implementation is for people to experiment with the implementation and give feedback, especially before stabilization.

If you are a feature implementer and would like your RFC to appear in this list, add a call-for-testing label to your RFC along with a comment providing testing instructions and/or guidance on which aspect(s) of the feature need testing.

No calls for testing were issued this week by Rust, Cargo, Rustup or Rust language RFCs.

Let us know if you would like your feature to be tracked as a part of this list.

Call for Participation; projects and speakers

CFP - Projects

Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but did not know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started!

Some of these tasks may also have mentors available, visit the task page for more information.

No Calls for participation were submitted this week.

If you are a Rust project owner and are looking for contributors, please submit tasks here or through a PR to TWiR or by reaching out on Bluesky or Mastodon!

CFP - Events

Are you a new or experienced speaker looking for a place to share something cool? This section highlights events that are being planned and are accepting submissions to join their event as a speaker.

If you are an event organizer hoping to expand the reach of your event, please submit a link to the website through a PR to TWiR or by reaching out on Bluesky or Mastodon!

Updates from the Rust Project

564 pull requests were merged in the last week

Compiler
Library
Cargo
Rustdoc
Clippy
Rust-Analyzer
Rust Compiler Performance Triage

Several pull requests introduced (usually very small) regressions across the board this week. On the other hand, #151380 provided a nice performance win in the inference engine. I would also like to bring attention to #152375, which improved the parallel frontend. It is not shown in this report, because we don't yet have many benchmarks for the parallel frontend, but this PR seemingly improved the check (wall-time) performance with multiple frontend threads on several real-world crates by 5-10%!

Triage done by @kobzol. Revision range: 39219ceb..3c9faa0d

Summary:

(instructions:u) mean range count
Regressions ❌
(primary)		 0.7% [0.2%, 3.1%] 96
Regressions ❌
(secondary)		 1.1% [0.0%, 5.7%] 62
Improvements ✅
(primary)		 -0.4% [-0.9%, -0.2%] 8
Improvements ✅
(secondary)		 -2.6% [-7.0%, -0.0%] 45
All ❌✅ (primary) 0.6% [-0.9%, 3.1%] 104

2 Regressions, 0 Improvements, 9 Mixed; 4 of them in rollups 36 artifact comparisons made in total

Full report here.

Approved RFCs

Changes to Rust follow the Rust RFC (request for comments) process. These are the RFCs that were approved for implementation this week:

Final Comment Period

Every week, the team announces the 'final comment period' for RFCs and key PRs which are reaching a decision. Express your opinions now.

Tracking Issues & PRs

Rust

Compiler Team (MCPs only)

Leadership Council

No Items entered Final Comment Period this week for Rust RFCs, Cargo, Language Team, Language Reference, or Unsafe Code Guidelines.

Let us know if you would like your PRs, Tracking Issues or RFCs to be tracked as a part of this list.

New and Updated RFCs

Upcoming Events

Rusty Events between 2026-02-18 - 2026-03-18 🦀

Virtual
Asia
Europe
North America
Oceania

If you are running a Rust event please add it to the calendar to get it mentioned here. Please remember to add a link to the event too. Email the Rust Community Team for access.

Jobs

Please see the latest Who's Hiring thread on r/rust

Quote of the Week

Clearly there is such a thing as too much syntactic sugar (as one of my professors put it, "syntactic sugar causes semantic cancer"), but at the same time also clearly some syntactic sugar is worth having.

- Ralf Jung on rust-internals

Thanks to robofinch for the suggestion!

Please submit quotes and vote for next week!

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Discuss on r/rust

18 Feb 2026 5:00am GMT