India IT secretary urges domestic AI and cyber defence build‑out

Krishnan’s message is blunt: India cannot afford to be a passive consumer of foreign AI in critical infrastructure. Tying AI explicitly to cybersecurity reframes frontier models from productivity tools to national‑security assets, which need domestic control over models, data and compute. The Digital Threat Report’s finding that adversarial AI is already reshaping fraud and attack patterns reinforces that this isn’t a hypothetical future risk.

Strategically, this sets up a two‑track AI agenda for India. On one track, the government wants world‑class offensive and defensive cyber capabilities powered by AI, which pushes it toward bespoke models, threat‑intel datasets and sovereign cloud. On the other, it needs financial institutions and payment providers to adopt AI responsibly without turning the BFSI stack into an unmanageable black box. That tension — between autonomy and interoperability — will shape how India engages with global labs and cloud providers.

For the broader AGI race, a more assertive India increases multipolarity. If New Delhi backs serious domestic model training and security research, it adds another heavyweight to a club currently dominated by US and Chinese actors, which could diversify both safety norms and technical approaches.