The image itself was the argument. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stood on stage in New Delhi alongside Narendra Modi, Emmanuel Macron, and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres — not in the Amazon, not at a climate summit where the developing world is typically cast as supplicant, but at the World AI Summit, where the rules governing the most consequential technology of this century are being drafted in real time. Brazil intends to have a seat at that table.
"Artificial intelligence without regulation threatens democracy and deepens inequality," Lula told assembled world leaders at the summit in India on Thursday, according to RFI Brasil. The Brazilian president argued forcefully for universal access to AI technology and for governance frameworks that prevent the benefits of the digital revolution from being captured exclusively by wealthy nations and their technology corporations — a message tailored precisely for an audience that extends far beyond the hall in New Delhi.
The summit brought together an extraordinary concentration of global leadership. Modi, who has positioned India as a rising force in digital infrastructure and AI development, hosted a gathering that reflected the extent to which artificial intelligence has moved from technology-sector debate to head-of-state agenda. Macron's presence signalled Europe's determination to set regulatory standards before US and Chinese platforms entrench themselves as the default global architecture. Guterres brought the UN's framework demand for AI governance that serves all of humanity, not just connected elites.
Into that company, Lula brought a voice that the others could not provide: the perspective of a nation of 215 million people where the promise of technology has historically arrived alongside its exclusions. Brazil's digital divide is not abstract — it runs between São Paulo's financial district and the favelas of Recife, between urban broadband and rural communities in the Amazon where internet access remains intermittent. A global AI governance framework built without that experience, Lula's presence signalled, is incomplete.
The soft-power calculus here is deliberate. Brazil holds the BRICS chairmanship and has spent the past year constructing a leadership identity that bridges the Global South's development demands with the West's institutional frameworks — a position that makes it uniquely placed to mediate on questions like AI governance, where technological power is heavily concentrated in the United States and China. Standing between Modi and Macron is not incidental. It is a statement of strategic positioning.
The summit also resonates with a domestic political debate that has consumed Brasília for weeks. The 40-hour workweek reform — a constitutional amendment reducing the maximum working week from 44 hours — is advancing in Congress, backed by a recent study from the government's own research institute, IPEA, which concluded that the economy can absorb the change without significant damage. The reform's opponents have focused heavily on automation: that AI-driven productivity gains justify maintaining longer working hours, or that reducing hours will accelerate the substitution of labour by machines. Lula's intervention at the global level — arguing that AI requires governance precisely because it poses distributional risks — mirrors the domestic argument his allies are making in the congressional chamber: that technological change must be managed in workers' interests, not left to capital's logic alone.
Gleisi Hoffmann, president of Lula's Workers' Party and a leading voice for the workweek reform, has drawn the connection explicitly, arguing that the IPEA study closes the economic objection and that AI-driven automation makes labour protections more urgent, not less. The summit appearance gives that argument an international frame: if Brazil is co-authoring the global rules on AI, its domestic labour reform is no longer merely a question of union politics — it is part of a coherent national position on how technology and work should coexist.
In Brazil, as across Latin America's giant, continental scale creates both opportunity and governance challenges. A country the size of a continent has both the diversity of experience and the moral weight to speak credibly for those who will be shaped by AI without having designed it. That is the case Lula made in New Delhi. Whether the global regulatory architecture that emerges from summits like this one reflects it is the test that follows.
