New Delhi, Jan 19 : India will prioritise building global consensus on common standards for artificial intelligence (AI) at the upcoming IndiaAI Impact Summit scheduled for February, officials said. The move comes amid fragmented global efforts, with AI standards currently being discussed across at least 38 multilateral committees, including several United Nations bodies and other international organisations.
According to officials in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, India is already participating in many of these discussions and has consolidated inputs from various ministries and agencies to shape its position on AI standard setting. The focus, they said, is on developing shared minimum norms that can guide responsible AI deployment worldwide.
India’s push is anchored in three guiding principles People, Planet and Progress which will form the thematic backbone of the summit. Under the “Progress” pillar, India is advocating equitable distribution of AI benefits, wider access to datasets, computing infrastructure and models, and the use of AI in priority sectors such as healthcare, education, governance and agriculture.
As part of this effort, India is keen to collaborate with global partners to establish an open-source repository of AI use cases tailored for sectors critical to the Global South. The country is also proposing tools and mechanisms to democratise access to AI resources, including data, algorithms and computing power.
A key proposal expected to be unveiled at the summit is ‘AI Commons’ a suite of open-access tools aimed at promoting ethical and responsible AI deployment. These tools would include features such as ethical AI certification, anonymisation frameworks and stress-testing mechanisms, with global participation encouraged.
Both initiatives are likely to be embedded within a proposed Global Partnership on AI, which India hopes to launch during the summit. Officials said India also supports the creation of a global funding facility to address challenges related to AI access, governance and capacity-building across countries.
On the domestic front, developing common standards and benchmarks remains a core objective under the India AI Governance Guidelines released last year. These benchmarks are intended to support regulatory goals such as content authentication, data integrity, cybersecurity, transparency and fairness.
Officials noted that growing international alignment is already underway. In recent months, bodies such as the Inter-Parliamentary Union, G20, G7 and major global standards organisations have released frameworks and codes of conduct aimed at responsible AI use. The February summit, they said, will serve as a platform to bring these efforts together and move towards more comprehensive and long-term global alignment on AI standards.