Xi’s AI Offer Meets Modi’s Minerals Warning at Brics Summit

The South China Morning Post reported that Xi Jinping closed the New Delhi Brics summit with an offer to support open-source AI and smart manufacturing across the bloc, while Narendra Modi used the same session to warn that technology and critical minerals can become economic weapons.

The contrast gave Brics a practical test of its Global South message.

Leaders signed a joint declaration opposing US tariffs, sanctions and "America first" pressure, yet the technology agenda exposed a harder question: whether members can seek shared rules while relying on competing powers for chips, minerals and industrial capacity.

Xi put open-source AI and smart factories among five initiatives for growth and technological development.

Beijing's package also included training for young people from other Brics countries in advanced technology and innovation, turning the proposal from a diplomatic slogan into a skills-and-infrastructure offer inside the US-China contest over computing.

The minerals issue explains why that offer is not neutral.

AI systems and smart factories need magnets, batteries, chips and processing equipment.

Many of the mineral chains needed for those inputs pass through China, while Washington controls important parts of the advanced-chip and chipmaking-equipment stack through export restrictions.

Modi's warning came from lived supply-chain experience.

Following the fatal 2020 clash on the China-India border, India faced slower fertiliser approvals and interruptions involving some equipment.

When Beijing later shifted rare earth magnets into a worldwide export-licensing regime during its tariff dispute with Washington in 2025, Indian car plants quickly felt the shortage.

New Delhi therefore tried to keep the summit's unity visible without letting internal friction define the meeting.

Liu Zongyi of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies said Brics divisions had sharpened as the group expanded, with geopolitics, political systems, development levels and national interests pulling members in different directions.

Those divisions did not prevent cooperation, but they set limits on the declaration.

Liu called geopolitical trust, particularly between China and India, the biggest problem inside Brics.

He also treated India's critical-minerals push as a way to bring China-related disputes into a wider forum when direct bilateral channels cannot easily resolve them.

The technology agenda carried a second ambition: rule-making.

For Liu, Brics cooperation could give the Global South, including China, more influence in emerging areas such as AI and space.

A coordinated bloc would make it harder for Western governments to set rules without considering developing economies that represent large markets and user bases.

Finance followed the same pattern of unity under constraint.

The South China Morning Post reported that, despite Donald Trump's threat of 100 per cent tariffs if Brics nations "play games" with the dollar, the bloc endorsed settlement in local currencies and connected payment systems as protection against sanctions or tariff pressure.

Members still differ on the pace and scale of any move away from the US currency.

Lin Minwang of Fudan University said those differences are unavoidable because each member manages Washington differently.

The unanimous declaration showed how US tariffs, sanctions and "America first" policies have worsened the development environment for much of the Global South, but Brics' rule-making power still depends on whether its members can turn divergent interests into durable consensus.