As the US and China engage in what many describe as an AI arms race, the rest of the world faces a stark choice. For a country like India, the traditional pursuit of strategic autonomy — a key pillar of its foreign policy — must be fundamentally re-imagined for the AI age. True autonomy in the 21st century will not come from tech protectionism or nationalism, but through a nuanced approach of building strategic interdependence.
As the India AI Impact Summit begins on Monday, India’s concept of “Atmanirbharta” (self-reliance) must evolve. For India, Atmanirbharta in AI should mean the guaranteed ability to access and shape the most advanced technology, rather than just the ability to build a sovereign Large Language Model (LLM).
Strategic autonomy is achieved by becoming so indispensable to the global AI ecosystem today that tomorrow, your exclusion becomes impossible. Strategic interdependence is a two-way street. India should create the code that everyone else’s applications run on, or the tools that everyone needs to build their applications, just as our applications run on others’ tools and code.
Examples abound: Taiwan has done it with its expertise in semiconductors while the Netherlands has done it with lithography machines. By ensuring the global ecosystem relies on at least some Indian layers or elements, India ensures that other players cannot make a move that hurts its interests without hurting their own ecosystems.
New blueprint for self-assurance
For “Atmanirbharta for the AI Age”, India must master critical niches in the global AI ecosystem. Achieving this requires action across several critical pillars:
Collaborative innovation at the frontier: India cannot settle for AI adoption alone. Lacking access to frontier R&D leaves a nation vulnerable to export controls and technological, economic and geopolitical domination by those who own the underlying technologies. India must partner with countries such as France, Japan and Singapore to do collaborative research at the frontier.
Open and interoperable AI: One of the fastest ways to bypass the dominance of proprietary models and technology is to double down on open-source interdependence. By contributing heavily to open-source architectures like Mistral or others, India ensures its ecosystem remains interoperable and free from the whims of a single foreign corporation. True autonomy will include the power to set the rules. India must aggressively partner with other like-minded nations in setting global, open and interoperable AI standards as well.
Diversified supply chains: Autonomy comes from not being beholden to a single entity. India must avoid vendor lock-ins at a nation-state level through diversified and strategic partnerships. India must map out the AI ecosystem and supply chains in great detail, and ensure a multiplicity of vendors in as many parts of the ecosystem as possible. And, of course, it must at the same time identify which parts of the supply chains it will dominate or own significant parts of in the medium to long term.
Leveraging the talent advantage: India’s unique talent pool is its greatest leverage in the global marketplace. India must continue creating an environment where our best and brightest work on sovereign-backed projects at home that connect to the global research community. To achieve strategic interdependence in this domain, for example, India should build corridors for its own domestic talent and global talent (including Indian-origin talent working abroad) to collaborate and move seamlessly between India and other countries.
Market and data as a bargaining chip: Just as India (and other countries) has done in other sectors like defence, India must smartly leverage its own digitally connected consumer market as a bargaining chip. By giving access to India’s market and its unique data sets, such as curated, anonymised data for training, in exchange for technology transfers or infrastructure investment, India can create reciprocal dependencies but also move up the technology value chain.
Focus on impact vs running the same race: The current global “brute force” approach to AI — throwing ever-increasing amounts of data and compute at problems — is likely a bubble that is ecologically and economically unsustainable. India’s strategy should be to lead the shift toward energy-efficient, specialised models (SLMs) that run on edge devices. Such frugal innovation, evidenced by the growing success of home-grown companies like Sarvam AI, is a natural strength for India. Moreover, India should seek to lead by focusing on “AI Impact”. Developing AI agents to act as personalised human tutors for children or tools for early tuberculosis detection builds a unique technological niche the rest of the world will eventually need to adopt.
The India AI Impact Summit as a historic moment
The India AI Impact Summit represents a historic moment where the Global South — and India — takes its seat at the head of the table and prioritizes inclusive, impactful and sustainable AI.
In doing so, we must remember that Atmanirbharta in the AI age is not about building walls; it is about building bridges. Strategic autonomy will be found in an interdependence that makes India’s contributions so vital to the world’s progress that its sovereignty is never in question.
By driving frontier innovation, shaping open standards, diversifying its supply chains, enhancing the talent pipeline, and leveraging its market access, India ensures that the global AI engine simply won’t run without an Indian key.
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Views expressed are personal.
Anirudh Suri is Managing Director at India Internet Fund, host of The Great Tech Game Podcast and a non-resident scholar with Carnegie India.
