India to join hands with France, others amid US, China’s nationalist pushnews24

New Delhi: The Indian government is expected to sign a multi-nation treaty by Tuesday at the ongoing Paris AI Action Summit being jointly chaired by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and France’s President Emmanuel Macron.

The agreement is expected to see India align with nations in the European Union, as well as others, on aspects including sharing of resources for AI development, and principles including the impact of AI on climate change and energy consumption, three people aware of the development in Paris told Mint.

A senior official at India’s ministry of electronics and information technology (Meity) denied that India is a part of ‘Current AI’—an initiative that is investing $400 million ( ₹3,500 crore) on sharing datasets and processors required to build AI models. Eight nations, including France, are a part of it, one of the officials cited above said.

It is yet unclear how many countries are expected to give their nod to a multi-nation agreement at the global artificial intelligence conference being held at the Grand Palais in the French capital on 10 and 11 February. More than 90 countries are participating in the summit.

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The treaty, experts said, could bode well for India, and align with its own AI Mission currently spearheaded by Meity—especially in light of the US’s ‘America-first’ approach, as well as China’s advances in this nascent field.

“The objective behind the potential agreement is to find a collaborative framework for nations to work on AI,” one of the officials cited above said, requesting anonymity since the clauses have not been made public yet. The official added that to enable this, agreeing upon collaborative development of AI across nations, and not a closed-border approach, would be key.

“India being a leading innovator in AI will be one of the most important signatories to this treaty,” this official said.

In November 2023, the UK AI Summit’s Bletchley Park declaration agreed upon principles around safety and bias in global AI development. Shortly after that, in December 2023, India’s Global Partnership in AI (GPAI) Summit offered a similar agreement. Each of the officials cited above said that Paris’ upcoming agreement would be “more definitive and action oriented.”

At the moment, it is not clear if special legal provisions will be required for enabling global AI collaboration, such as cross-border sharing of sensitive data—which proprietary, local-language datasets from various countries may contain.

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India’s Digital Personal Data Privacy (DPDP) Act, 2023 paves the way for the Centre to allow strategic nations to keep India’s data. Historically, India and France have had a strong bilateral geopolitical friendship.

Earlier on Monday (Sunday in Paris local time), Macron announced that France will invest €109 billion ( ₹9.9 trillion) in AI infrastructure research and development, calling the investment “the equivalent for France of what the United States announced with Stargate”. French AI and data services startup Mistral will build the first data centre facility under the French AI mission.

A joint statement from all the participating nations at the Paris AI Summit is expected, a draft copy of which was floated online on Monday. Mint has seen a copy of the statement, but senior industry and government officials from India in Paris did not authenticate the veracity of the draft statement at the time of publishing.

The statement notes six key priority points that nations in attendance may agree upon. These include promoting AI accessibility to reduce digital divides maintaining ethical, secure and trustworthy AI; enabling conditions for AI development and avoiding market concentration; efforts to positively shape the future of work and labour markets; sustainable AI; and reinforcing international cooperation.

Modi and Macron are expected to be joined by J.D. Vance, vice-president of the United States, Zhang Guoqing, vice-premier of China, and Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada. Notably, US president Donald Trump and China premier Xi Jinping will not be at the summit. Also in attendance are Google and OpenAI chief executives, Sundar Pichai and Sam Altman.

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Industry stakeholders said such a collaborative framework is likely to be in line with expectations. Kashyap Kompella, AI analyst and founder of tech consultancy firm RPA2AI Research, said that the summit “may spur the launch of multiple national AI initiatives, which will see the creation of national large language models”.

However, he also added that it “is possible to create a shared resources framework, as well as a shared marketplace across nations for AI startups”.