This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

This report is adapted from Rest of World’s recent feature “The global struggle over how to regulate AI,” written by Katie McQue, Laís Martins, Ananya Bhattacharya, and Carien du Plessis.

Artificial intelligence’s true believers say it will revolutionise industries, supercharge scientific research, and make many aspects of life more efficient. Globally, some politicians and tech experts are uneasy about the possibility that such powerful technology could be misused. Legislators, tech experts and activists have proposed stricter rules around things like copyright, data protection, deepfakes, the creation of autonomous weapons, and cyberattacks.

The most ambitious AI law passed to date is the EU’s 2024 AI Act. Canada is attempting to take a similar approach to the EU, and in the US, some states have taken the lead, with California’s governor recently signing 17 AI bills into law. And while countries like Chile and South Korea are proposing and passing landmark bills to regulate AI, in other non-Western nations, the priority isn’t regulation but rather courting large AI companies to make massive investments. In India, according to industry sources, AI companies are currently being welcomed with open arms.

India is home to the world’s largest internet base outside of China and has an extensive history of regulating Big Tech companies. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration has put Apple, Google, Amazon and Meta under fire for anti-competitive practices, and, in a 2021 Digital Media Ethics Code, laid out several controversial mandates for social media platforms, such as adding traceability to encrypted messages and honoring government takedown requests. With AI, though, the administration has signaled a friendlier attitude.

“A lot of the conversation just in the building is about building AI for India, and everybody wants to be involved in that,” said Aakrit Vaish, an adviser to the Indian government’s $1.2-billion AI initiative, IndiaAI. Modi’s administration has positioned India as a magnet for Silicon Valley funds. “This is the era of AI, and the future of the world is linked with it,” Modi declared in 2024.

Large US companies are investing in Indian AI companies and government projects while deploying their own AI products around the country. OpenAI has promised to support the IndiaAI initiative by heavily investing in the developer community. Meta has vowed to partner with it to “empower the next generation of innovators … ultimately propelling India to be at the forefront of global AI advancement”.

Amazon has earmarked millions of dollars to back Indian AI startups, billions more to grow its data center footprint, and forged a multiyear AI collaboration with the government-run Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Microsoft recently committed $3 billion to AI training, and cloud and AI infrastructure. Google is “robustly investing in AI in India,” its CEO has said, “and we look forward to doing more.”

Shweta Rajpal Kohli, a former public policy head with Uber and Salesforce in India and South Asia who now runs an interest group for domestic startups, told Rest of World the current focus for industry and government alike on AI is development and adoption. She summed up the dynamic with a longstanding Silicon Valley maxim: “Innovation will happen. Regulation will follow.”

India’s minister of electronics and information technology did not respond to a request for comment. He had said in December that while the government was open to regulating AI, it would take a “lot of consensus”, stressing that India should remain “at the forefront of ethical AI development.”

India’s state governments have been quick in adopting AI tools that feed on the massive amounts of data the country stores about its citizens. India has the world’s largest biometric ID system, and authorities use resident data to distribute benefits and assist police surveillance. These efforts now include AI.

The southern tech hub of Telangana, for example, has disclosed plans to use AI in health care, agriculture, manufacturing, and governance, in collaboration with Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta. “We want to unlock the full potential of AI while taking into account the anticipated risks,” Jayesh Ranjan, Telangana’s special chief secretary of commerce and IT departments, told Rest of World, adding that while “unregulated AI could lead to misuse, over-regulation could stifle innovation.”

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.