India, Sept. 14 -- The BRICS leaders left New Delhi with familiar promises about artificial intelligence. Their declaration called for access, safety, security and international cooperation, particularly for the Global South. It also promised digital skills and a future-ready workforce.

Those commitments, however painful to actualise, are necessary. But the Global South are also already hilariously behind on the technology they seek to govern. BRICS discussed how societies could adopt AI while the companies building its most powerful systems were warning that development itself had become reckless.

Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has now called for slowing capability gains so that safety work can catch up. OpenAI chief Sam Altman...