NEW DELHI, Feb 19, 2026 (BSS/AFP) - As artificial intelligence evolves at a blistering pace, world leaders and top tech CEOs have gathered at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi to discuss how to handle it.

Here are five big issues raised by the technology:

- Job loss fears -

Generative AI threatens to disrupt myriad industries, from software development and factory work to music and the movies.

India -- with its large customer service and tech support sectors -- could be vulnerable, and advances in AI assistant tools have caused share price dips for the country's outsourcing firms.

Dario Amodei, head of US artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, has warned that the technology could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar roles.

"We are creating human imitators. And so of course, the natural application for that type of system is replacing humans," leading computer science researcher Stuart Russell told AFP this week.

- Bad robots -

The Delhi summit is the fourth in a series of international AI meetings. The first in 2023 was called the AI Safety Summit, and preventing real-world harm is still a key goal.

In the United States, families of people who have taken their own lives have sued OpenAI, saying its ChatGPT chatbot contributed to the suicides. The company says it has made efforts to strengthen its safeguards.

Elon Musk's Grok AI tool also recently sparked global outrage and bans in several countries over its ability to create sexualised deepfakes depicting real people, including children, in skimpy clothing.

Other concerns range from copyright violations to scammers using AI tools to produce perfectly spelled phishing emails.

- Energy demands -

Tech giants are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure, building data centres packed with cutting-edge microchips and, in some cases, nuclear plants to power them.

The International Energy Agency projects that electricity consumption from data centres will double by 2030, fuelled by the AI boom.

In 2024, data centres accounted for an estimated 1.5 percent of global electricity consumption, it says.

Alongside concerns over planet-warming carbon emissions are worries about water use to cool the data centre servers, which can lead to shortages on hot days.

- Moves to regulate -

South Korea last month enacted a wide-ranging law regulating artificial intelligence that requires companies to tell users when products use generative AI.

Many countries are planning similar moves, despite a warning from US Vice President JD Vance last year against "excessive regulation" that could stifle innovation.

The European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act allows regulators to ban AI systems deemed to pose "unacceptable risks" to society.

That could include identifying people in real time in public spaces or evaluating criminal risk based on biometric data alone.

- 'Everyone dies' -

More existential fears have also been expressed by AI insiders who believe the technology is marching towards so-called "Artificial General Intelligence", when machines' abilities match those of humans.

OpenAI and Anthropic have seen public resignations of staff members who have spoken out about the ethical implications of their technology.

Anthropic warned last week that its latest chatbot models could be nudged towards "knowingly supporting -- in small ways -- efforts toward chemical weapon development and other heinous crimes".

Researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, author of the 2025 book "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All", has also compared AI to the development of nuclear weapons.