We have two covers this week. In our British and European editions we ask whether Britain can realise its AI ambitions. And in America and Asia we look at the budding relationship between the United States and India.

Among techies and investors, generative AI has stoked a frenzy of excitement (and some fears). This week Rishi Sunak told a conference in London that Britain can prosper from the booming opportunities offered by supercomputing and artificial intelligence, to become an AI superpower.

One idea covered the door to Number 10 Downing Street in the binary code used by computers, and filled out the ironwork nearby with @ signs. It was an optimistic take that endorsed Mr Sunak’s enthusiasm. Britain does indeed have plenty of advantages. It is home to several important AI companies, it has excellent universities, it welcomes highly skilled foreign workers and the state generates troves of data, especially in the NHS. And don’t forget that Brexit creates the chance for Britain to adopt a regulatory position that could be a model for medium-sized countries around the world.

However, that assessment struck us as too sunny, so we looked for something else. We created designs in which the faces of the London Eye and Big Ben were made to look as though they were waiting for AI to load. The focus here was on Britain’s shortcomings—and there are plenty of those, too. Britain is a smallish place. America’s dominance in tech exerts a steady pull on capital, people and ideas, and American firms duly dominate in AI. The way Brexit was done means that Britain has lost access to the European Union’s single market. Although Oracle, a big American tech company, has a British cluster of the advanced graphics-processing units needed to train large models, none of the cloud-computing giants has yet chosen Britain as the base for what techies call “compute”.

We ended up somewhere in between boosterism and defeatism. A later idea showed the prime minister standing over a Tandy 1000 in a clean white shirt, and it nicely undercut the breathlessness of his ambition for superpower status. In the final image we swapped the Tandy for a BBC Micro and chose a shirt with an even wider collar. Mr Sunak’s broad smile says that, although you shouldn’t get too excited, good things do happen.

Leader: How Britain can become an AI superpower
Britain: Rishi Sunak’s bet that Britain can prosper from AI requires a new approach

In the rest of the world we write about America’s new best friend. When Narendra Modi visits Washington next week, he will receive a rapturous welcome. India’s prime minister has been afforded the honour of a state visit by President Joe Biden. The Americans hope to strike defence deals. Mr Modi will be one of the few foreign leaders, along with Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela and Volodymyr Zelensky, to address a joint session of Congress more than once.

You might think America and India are natural partners. One of the world’s fastest-growing economies, its GDP is expected to overtake Japan’s and Germany’s by 2028. Thanks in part to its diaspora, India can boast of world-beating soft power. And India has become indispensable to America’s effort to assert itself in Asia and deter Chinese aggression.

However, as our ideas made clear, this relationship will not be easy. India’s pro-Western tilt is pragmatic. It is suspicious of Western countries and rejects their claim to global leadership. From Jawaharlal Nehru to Mr Modi, India considers the post-war order to have offered it little more than another bout of domination by other countries.

In one design, Joe Biden, dressed as Joe Exotic, the felonious Tiger King in a Netflix series, was cuddling a tiger, a creature that is friendly for as long as it chooses and not a minute longer.

The US-India relationship is a test case for the messy alliance of democracies emerging in a multipolar world. Under Mr Modi’s Hindu nationalist, Islamophobic party, India is increasingly hostile to over 200m of its own people. Lynchings and the dispossession of Christians and Muslims are becoming more common. The press and the courts are largely pliant. In another idea, the elephant in the room—or rather the Indian elephant our designers put standing in the Oval Office—is that India is an American strategic partner which mistrusts the West, has different values, is unlikely ever to enter a formal alliance with America and is attached to Russia, which supplies it with arms.

The elephant left us feeling downbeat. We preferred the preposterously vibrant Joe Biden and his new BFF. We showed the American president with his arm wrapped around the tiger’s neck. In reality he may have caught it by the tail.

Asia: America is courting India in part for its growing economic clout
Asia: India’s foreign minister on ties with America, China and Russia
Asia: On defence, America and India edge closer together
Asia: Narendra Modi is the world’s most popular leader
International: India’s diaspora is bigger and more influential than any in history