BRICS leaves Delhi with a minerals warning and a Chinese open-source AI pledge

The 18th BRICS summit closed in New Delhi on Sunday with two messages that sit side by side. Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the final session that the weaponisation of technology and critical minerals can hinder shared progress and that the grouping had therefore stressed inclusivity in the adoption of technology. Chinese President Xi Jinping, sitting in the same hall, announced that China would lead an open-source AI ecosystem for BRICS members as part of a five-point plan on technology, manufacturing and trade. China takes the presidency from India for the coming year.

The New Delhi Declaration, adopted on Saturday after late bargaining between Iran and the United Arab Emirates, called for maximum restraint in the West Asia war and did not name the United States, Israel or Iran as authors of specific strikes. It also skipped a separate paragraph on Russia's war in Ukraine. It did support comprehensive United Nations reform and a larger role for India and Brazil in the Security Council. Paragraph 67 repeated last year's Rio language on reliable, diversified and just supply chains for critical minerals, while preserving sovereign rights over those resources.

Why minerals were the Sunday subject

China processes most of the world's rare earths and has used export licences as a political tool. Indian firms spent 2025 waiting on licences for rare earth magnets after Beijing tightened rules in October of that year and then eased some of them following a Trump-Xi meeting in Busan. Modi did not name China on Sunday. He did not need to. The same sentence also cuts toward Western export controls on advanced chips and software. Both forms of restriction have become ordinary tools of statecraft. BRICS contains countries on every side of those controls: China, India, Russia, Iran, the UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil.

Leaders present included Vladimir Putin, Xi, Iran's Masoud Pezeshkian, and the heads of government of Indonesia, Ethiopia, Egypt and South Africa. Brazil and the UAE sent high-level representatives. Getting Iran and the UAE to accept the same war language was the diplomatic result India wanted from the chair. The price was vagueness.

Open source as a political offer

Xi's open-source AI pledge is a concrete follow-up that also serves a strategy. Western labs are arguing this week about whether to slow frontier training. A Chinese offer to share models and tools with BRICS members positions Beijing as the supplier of last resort if American systems come with more conditions. It also spreads Chinese technical standards through the same capitals that buy Chinese telecoms and solar kit.

Modi held an hour-long bilateral with Xi after Saturday's session and further meetings on the sidelines with leaders from Kazakhstan, Egypt, the Philippines and Uzbekistan. Indian briefings put defence and security cooperation beside trade. The public line from Beijing after those talks was that India views the relationship from a strategic and long-term perspective and is independent of third-party influence.

Putin used the summit to float BRICS grain trade as a way around global curbs. That idea will now sit on China's agenda, not India's. So will the minerals paragraph that New Delhi wrote and could not enforce.

What the declaration leaves open

BRICS now counts 11 members and talks for about half the world's population and two-fifths of global output. It still cannot name a war that several of its members are in. The New Delhi text is therefore best read as a list of files that survived a veto: UN seats, minerals language, restraint without attribution, and a presidency handover. The files that did not survive are the ones that would have assigned blame in West Asia or in Ukraine.

Modi's minerals sentence will be quoted in Indian industry for as long as Chinese licences remain slow. Xi's AI sentence will be quoted in the same capitals as a reason to keep talking to Beijing even when Washington is asking them to pace the frontier. Both quotes left Delhi on the same afternoon.