Former Minister made the case for India to have its own “Sovereign AI” strategy — to develop, control, and deploy its own AI capabilities, emphasizing its implications for economic and national security.

What is Sovereign AI?

• It can broadly be understood as nation’s capabilities and control over AI technologies and associated data. 
  • This often includes how the AI technologies are deployed and operated as well as the policies and personnel used to operate the AI technologies and protect the data.
• Proposed AI Strategy for India
  • GovAI + Private AI = Sovereign AI
  • GovAI means the deployment of AI in the use cases related to Governance, such as delivery of public services.
  • GovAI can be built and deployed over the existing Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) such as digital payments, insurance, health, education, skills, etc., which has huge repositories that can be transformed into consented personal data and/or non-personal training data for AI models.

Significance of Sovereign AI for India

• Strategic: Building India’s AI capabilities can take on a strategic goal of protecting our own economic interests from risks of AI denial or weaponisation by countries in an increasingly competitive world.
• Economic: To enable Indian innovators and entrepreneurs to compete with Big Tech models and platforms.