Sovereign artificial intelligence: A strategic imperative for coming wave

The age of artificial intelligence (AI) is here, with AI representing a major strategic opportunity and a national security imperative.

 

While India’s digital and innovation economy is growing thrice as fast as the rest of the economy, with the aim of reaching a size of $1 trillion soon, the central government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has invested in both semiconductors and AI.

 

AI has seen remarkable growth in recent years: Compared with 2018, when a 340 million-parameter model was considered “big”, ChatGPT today has 1.8 trillion parameters, Gemini 1.5 trillion, and China’s DeepSeek 240 billion.

 

But this truly remarkable growth is concentrated in just a few companies in just a few countries. For a world struggling to deal with the power of the Big Tech, the coming second wave of AI also presents new challenges. As Economist Nouriel Roubini says, “this wakeup call from the future warns of just what’s coming, and what the global economic and political implications are likely to be”.

 

The impact of AI is deep and profound. It has become critical not just for economic/digital sovereignty but also national Security. I make a case here for India to have its own “Sovereign AI” strategy — to develop, control, and deploy its own AI capabilities, even as it partners with other countries and companies. This will be critical as we look to our future as one of the top-three economies.

 

Strategic importance

 

The race for AI supremacy is about technological advancements. It also represents a fundamental shift in how nations will drive economic growth and competitiveness in this decade. The countries that rely solely on foreign AI risk compromising their strategic independence, data sovereignty, and economic capabilities.

 

Sovereign AI means building India’s AI capabilities — from research & development to deployment and management – that can add to global AI research and also 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. As Author Yuval Harari puts it, “the coming technological wave promises to provide humanity with godlike powers of creation, but if we fail to manage it wisely, it may destroy us”.

 

While sovereign AI is a response to the concentration of AI power in just a few companies and countries, developing AI capabilities will not be easy, trivial or for the fainthearted. Real cutting-edge talent, capabilities and partnerships with the private sector and academia will have to be part of our national strategy.

 

Vital guarantor for economy

 

For India’s economic ambitions, AI will be a strategic focus. It is a layer on the internet in most commercial applications, and India has invested heavily in digital and innovation economy on the internet. AI will also transform and disrupt the entire landscape of industry and economy as we know it, and it will also deeply transform digital governance and digital public infrastructure. Robotics and autonomous systems will transform manufacturing and services, and synthetic biology will transform health care. Human Longevity and productivity will impact the workforce, economy and national competitiveness.

 

As we see the progress being made by a handful of companies like OpenAI, Meta, Google, GrokAI and Claude in the US, and DeepSeek in China, it becomes imperative for India to envision and build its own AI capabilities. To be sure, India’s young innovators are creating and will continue to create many “wrapper” AI applications, built on global large language models (LLMs). The dependence on the Big Tech models and platforms is a longstanding strategy of the Big Tech to ensure proliferation of their tech.

 

The development of this innovation ecosystem must not be mistaken with ‘Sovereign AI’ road map and its strategic imperative. India’s ambition must not only be about use-case solutions with wrapper AI apps or small language models but also of being at the forefront of shaping the future of AI with deep capabilities and talent.

 

Economic data, technological sovereignty

 

First, the world, including India, is already struggling with the power of the Big Tech. Now, their AI models will only increase their already significant power over the internet and digital economy.

 

Second, we now know that the impact of AI will extend to every part of our economy — beyond just digitisation. AI will also determine industrial competitiveness. Nations with strong AI capabilities can better protect and develop their intellectual property, innovation and competitive advantage in manufacturing and services. So, it follows that countries without AI will not be competitive in future.

 

Third, sovereign AI capabilities are vital to prevent economic coercion and dependence on foreign models. They also protect strategic industries and interests.

 

Almost every one of the large AI platforms uses Indian data scraped and harvested via social media platforms, search engines, etc, without any consent or attribution. So, the other outcome of this will be ‘data sovereignty’, meaning control over and curation of Indian data and datasets, including their processing and storage.

 

With US President Donald Trump and emergence of powerful Big Tech around him, digital trade and access to AI reciprocity could become elements of future negotiations. More follow-up legislation like the proposed Digital India Act and an IndiaDataSets programme are required to enable sovereign AI, which also ensure protection of citizen privacy, and guardrails to see that AI models are safe and trusted.

 

National security in 21st century

 

AI is revolutionising the security landscape. Recent conflicts in Europe and West Asia have shown how consumer grade tech, coupled with AI, is completely transforming battlefields and asymmetric conflict. AI is deeply transforming national security tools, platforms. So, sovereign AI is vital for maintaining a country’s autonomy and safeguarding its strategic interests.

 

Advanced AI systems, meanwhile, are transforming military operations through improved battlefield awareness, autonomous systems like drones, and predictive analytics for threat assessment – which are redrawing conventional battlefields. AI systems will play a vital role in protecting power grids, transportation networks, and communication systems from cyberattacks and physical threats. AI-powered surveillance, threat detection, and cyber defence systems are essential for today’s and tomorrow’s intelligence and anti-terror operations, even as AI makes asymmetric conflict more viable and potent. Dependence on foreign AI technology for critical national security creates potential vulnerabilities that adversaries could exploit.

 

The way forward

 

Total AI self-reliance may not be practical. But India’s strategic partnerships with other nations and companies could shape the future of AI. India’s sovereign AI capabilities will put us in a position where we can work with other trusted partners to develop future AI and for inclusion of tech as PM Modi’s government has done with digital public infrastructure.

 

With the battle for power in the age of AI on, it is an exciting and worrying time. There is a need to be “situationally aware” about the changes and unprecedented velocity of changes.

 

Leopold Aschenbrenner of Open AI says: “Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters.”

 

PM Modi’s view is that tech, including AI, should be inclusive and available to all, but it is clear that this thought is not shared by others. That then is the case for India to build its sovereign AI while continuing to advocate partnerships in AI. Being a spectator in this race is simply not an option. 

The author is a former Union minister 

(This is the first of three parts in a series on the AI opportunity in India that Mr Chandrasekhar is writing exclusively for Business Standard. Parts 2 & 3 will be published on the BS website soon)