Agentic AI and India: Implications for Security, Governance, and International Partnerships

Editor: Dhruva Jaishankar
Authors: Soumya Awasthi, Ishita Deshmukh, Sameer Patil, Kavya Wadhwa, Purushraj Patnaik, Pranoy Jainendran, Sameer Patil, Rahul Rawat, Debjyoti Chakravorty, Basu Chandola, and Tanusha Tyagi

editor’s note

Artificial intelligence (AI) represents a revolutionary suite of technologies that is already transforming international relations in at least two ways. AI is reshaping national economies and their global competitiveness: growth, productivity, employment, development, and investment. It is also transforming national strategies around the world, with implications for defense and security, war and peace, and offense and defense. Agentic AI—the ability of AI to identify and execute multiple steps towards specific objectives with limited human intervention—represents a dramatic new step in AI’s development. But it also raises new challenges, risks, and concerns, debates about which are changing almost in real time.

To this end, the Observer Research Foundation America (ORF America) in Washington, D.C., and its partners at the Observer Research Foundation in India and at ORF Middle East in Dubai have compiled this edited volume to examine how agentic AI is reshaping India’s security, governance, and international partnerships. As Soumya Awasthi and Ishita Deshmukh write, AI is already central to India’s national security, generating new concerns and opportunities. But the development by Anthropic of Mythos and Fable 5 have opened new debates around sovereignty and access. Purushraj Patnaik and Pranoy Jainendran suggest how India can prepare for AIgenerated disinformation and information warfare, including the necessity of partnerships. Sameer Patil, together with Kavya Wadhwa and Rahul Rawat, writes about the implications of agentic AI for India’s nuclear security and multilateral risk reduction efforts.

In the second part of this volume, the lens turns to the implications of agentic AI for Indian governance, again with widespread international implications. Purushraj Patnaik outlines the need for a policy framework for policing algorithms. Debjyoti Chakravarty highlights a particular Indian priority of harnessing AI for better public service delivery. Patnaik, Basu Chandola, and Tanusha Tyagi examine the regulatory and legal basis for some important trends in India: the training of physical AI systems, the implications of AI-enabled search, and the gendering of AI companions. As these examples illustrate, AI is increasingly touching upon almost every aspect of daily life, not just in India but around the world.

This volume hopefully represents an early and important contribution to insights on India’s AI policy ecosystem. Remarkable breakthroughs in frontier models in 2025, 2026, and beyond are bound to continuously reshape this landscape. India’s experiences in creating a regulatory, legal, and policy environment for AI security and governance are useful not only for the world’s largest democracy, but for the lessons that can be derived for developers and technologists in developed economies such as the United States, and for other governments, economies, and societies across the developing world.

Dhruva Jaishankar
Executive Director, ORF America

Observer Research Foundation America, 1100 17th St. NW, Suite 501, Washington DC 20036 USA