No Seat at the Table: Why the Global South is Absent from the AI Governance Conversation

In this commentary, BIPSS Research Assistant Nabib Bin Zahid explored how South Asia supplies the data, the labor, and a fast-growing share of the user base that frontier AI runs on, while holding almost no seat at the summits and advisory bodies setting its safety thresholds and governance norms. He looks at why that exclusion isn’t only imposed from outside, India’s own path from Bletchley to co-chairing Paris to hosting the 2026 summit shows what’s possible when a state organizes for a seat, while the wider region has not followed. He also looks at a quieter cost: how the languages and assumptions built into these systems default to a handful of high-resource languages, leaving Bengali, Nepali, and Sinhala on the margins of the models shaping their own societies.