India’s approach to artificial intelligence is slowly but surely taking shape, and will inform next year’s AI Impact Summit — a global gathering of political, business, and technology leaders — which India will host on February 16-19, 2026. Representatives from over 100 countries have been invited for the Summit, with about 20 heads of state or government expected to attend, along with over 50 CEOs. Shaped by its own national objectives, advantages, and limitations, India’s AI strategy stands out in several ways, with implications for the country’s AI infrastructure, its attempts at developing an AI-ready workforce, data-driven governance, and its prospects for innovation. Four factors are worth highlighting:
Frugal Development. India has much more limited resources to invest in AI — whether financial or physical — than the United States or China, or even the European Union. It will therefore have little choice but to focus on specific infrastructure and models to achieve productive outcomes. With concerns about an AI bubble, there is growing scrutiny of the revenue potential of several large-scale and resource-intensive AI enterprises. To steer efforts, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) established the IndiaAI Mission to facilitate access to advanced compute, foundational models, and data sets; help develop applications, skills, and financing; and ensure safety measures. Among other steps, the Indian government has tried to facilitate access to over 34,000 GPUs and provide them at a low cost to Indian developers. Over 2000 datasets have also been made publicly available, for the benefit of India’s start up ecosystem. Public education and training programs have focused not just on funding research and development (which remains limited in India), but on ensuring AI readiness for public officials and skills for labor-intensive data annotation.
Innovation First, Safety Second. There is clarity at the senior levels of the Indian government that AI regulation should not impede AI innovation. Rather than overly constrain AI based on vague fears, such as of artificial general intelligence (or AGI), the government seeks to use existing legal and regulatory structures to address challenges such as deep fakes and personal data protections. The lighter regulatory touch — in contrast to the “safety-first” approach espoused by the European Union — is reflected in India’s international engagements. Next year’s AI Impact Summit in India follows three other global conferences on the subject. The first was an AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in November 2023, followed by the AI Seoul Summit the following year. In 2025, India co-hosted an AI Action Summit in Paris, along with the French government. Next year’s Summit is purposefully intended to shift the narrative around AI from fear ("safety") to opportunity ("impact").
Applications as the Objective. The Indian government’s AI focus is squarely on outcomes: the deployment of AI that improves productivity, growth, and development for the population at large. This is not simply altruistic: translating the tangible benefits of AI for the average Indian voter is also politically important. In practical terms, this may mean the development in India of smaller AI models with specific applications for health, education, agriculture, and manufacturing. There is a major emphasis on language translation — to empower speakers of several Indian regional languages — and voice-enabled functions. Already, Indian start-ups are developing some innovative AI-enabled applications, whether for vehicle safety, efficient farming, or primary education.
Leveraging People and Data. Despite the very real challenges and limitations India faces in its development of AI applications, it has two major advantages, both a consequence of its large population: plentiful data and a sizeable workforce. By some estimates, India generates about 20% of all the data in the world. It also has highly varied data, generated by people from very different income and cultural groups, in over 22 major languages, as well as a national stack for payments and other digital public infrastructure. This is invaluable for the development and training of models that might work globally. Furthermore, despite skill shortages in several areas, India also has a large STEM-educated working-age population, one that is already contributing in various ways to the global AI ecosystem, whether in terms of programming, design, testing, or cybersecurity.
Implications for India-U.S. Relations
These key features of India’s approach to AI have important implications for the country, but also for its partnership with the United States. There have certainly been difficulties in India-U.S. ties this year, notably the high tariffs being levied by the United States on many Indian exports and a resurgence of U.S.-Pakistan ties. Despite these obstacles, defense and tech cooperation has not yet noticeably slowed, with the two countries signing a new 10 year defense framework agreement, continuing military exercises, and increasing technology investments.
Under these circumstances, India is likely to continue investing in a tech partnership with the United States, while hedging against areas of potential coercion by Washington. At the same time, for the United States, India remains important to leverage what some have called ‘allied scale.’ In other words, the global competitiveness of U.S. technology companies vis-à-vis emerging Chinese competitors can only be achieved by tapping India’s data, workforce, lower-cost manufacturing, and markets. This explains why the likes of Google and Microsoft have increased their investments in India, OpenAI has adapted its model for the Indian market, and Anthropic is opening its first office in the country.
Strengthening the India-U.S. tech partnership is therefore theoretically compatible with an 'America First' philosophy that is likely to guide the United States’ international outlook for the foreseeable future. Potentially, India-U.S. AI cooperation could extend to hardware, models, workforce challenges, policy coordination, and applications. Some areas of potential cooperation involve short-term objectives, whereas others — such as addressing workforce shortfalls — may only be resolved in the medium- to long-term. But there are also important areas where the two countries’ priorities do not neatly overlap: India’s desire to exploit AI for its domestic development goals, for example, is unlikely to generate much interest in either the U.S. government or among American investors.
But while remaining conscious of such limitations, the two countries can find areas of mutually-overlapping interests when it comes to AI development and deployment. Unlike the Paris Summit of 2025, where Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech criticizing European regulation stole the headlines, the U.S. government could approach next year's summit in India constructively, as a venue to highlight greater competitiveness in the Global South through demonstrable use cases and reinforce the advantages of lighter AI regulation in the developing world. Given that AI impinges upon the jurisdictions of multiple agencies and departments in both countries, a joint India-U.S. AI Working Group would help address coordination challenges in investment, infrastructure, policy, supply chain integrity, and export controls. Jointly developed applications could focus on dual-use functions, such as maritime security, as well as civilian outcomes such as disaster management. For example, data from the NISAR satellite launched by the two countries could be used for anticipating forest fires, while AI-enabled farm equipment can help reduce stubble burning and pollution in India. When it comes to talent and workforce development, creating commonly recognized certifications for various AI-related careers — as have been established for cybersecurity — would help identify talent shortfalls, create incentives for students, and define guidelines for visa regimes. These small steps could help advance the very different objectives of India and the United States when it comes to the future of artificial intelligence.
Dhruva Jaishankar is Executive Director at ORF America.