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AI governance, safety and ethics
How artificial intelligence is governed: national and international rules, safety and the risks of frontier models, deepfakes, copyright, bias, liability and autonomous weapons. Prelims has asked about the AI Action Summit in Paris.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2025: the AI Action Summit held in Paris
17 Aug 2026 · 14 Aug 2026 · Prelims and Mains
The European Union's AI Act
The Act's method is risk based regulation: the duties on a system scale with the harm a use could do. A ban stands at one end of that scale and a labelling duty near the other.
Unacceptable risk
- Some uses of artificial intelligence are banned outright
High risk
- A system needs a conformity assessment before it reaches the market
Limited risk
- Lighter checks apply
- The AI Act became applicable on 2 August 2026, the first comprehensive artificial intelligence law anywhere.
- It had been in force since August 2024, so its duties bite two years on.
- An enforcement team was launched the same day.
- Compliance deadlines for standalone high risk systems were pushed back to December 2027.
- Content generated by artificial intelligence must be labelled or watermarked under the Act's transparency duties.
- Anthropic has said it will embed machine readable watermarks in Claude's text and files to meet that duty.
The Hindu, 17 Aug 2026: Anthropic watermarking of Claude AI content, explained (opens in a new tab) · The Hindu, 14 Aug 2026: Europe's AI rules may become India's opportunity (opens in a new tab) · The Hindu, 1 Aug 2026: EU AI Act becomes applicable (opens in a new tab)
6 Aug 2026 · Prelims and Mains
Deepfake labelling rules
India reaches artificial intelligence through the platform that carries the content rather than through the model that made it. These rules bind the intermediary, and on 10 February 2026 they were amended to reach what a machine makes.
- The Information Technology Rules, 2021 place duties on intermediaries, including social media platforms.
- A significant social media intermediary is a platform with 50 lakh registered users or more.
- Such platforms must use automated tools to stop child sexual abuse material and the like before it spreads.
- The amendment covers synthetically generated information, which is where a deepfake now sits in Indian law.
- Permitted artificial intelligence content must carry clear labels and traceable metadata.
- Takedown on a court order or a reasoned government intimation falls from 36 hours to three.
- A grievance must be settled in 36 hours rather than 72, and a sensitive case such as nudity or impersonation in two hours rather than 24.
PIB, 6 Aug 2026: Deepfakes: labelling rules and three-hour takedown (opens in a new tab) · Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, 10 Feb 2026: The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, updated as on 10.02.2026 (opens in a new tab)
2 Sep 2026 · Prelims and Mains
Copyright in a machine generated work
A copyright needs an author, and an author in Indian law is a person. That is the whole of the Copyright Office's answer when it was asked to name a machine.
- India's Copyright Office refused to name the artificial intelligence system DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience) as an author.
- Under Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act the author of a computer generated work is the person who causes it to be created.
12 Sep 2026 · 2 Sep 2026 · Prelims and Mains
Global governance of artificial intelligence
Governments and laboratories are arguing less about which rules to write than about whether artificial intelligence needs rules written for it at all. The blocs that answered in September answered differently.
- At the Group of Twenty the United States pressed its Carolina Principles, which urge governments to avoid artificial intelligence specific rules.
- India joined the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Leaders' Statement on the Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence, which sought stronger international cooperation and wider access to artificial intelligence resources.
- Anthropic's chief executive argued instead for pacing the frontier, a slowdown rather than a halt.
The Hindu, 12 Sep 2026: BRICS leaders call for stronger international cooperation, wider access to AI resources (opens in a new tab) · The Indian Express, 2 Sep 2026: US urges G20 to adopt lighter AI regulation as tech leaders warn against restrictions (opens in a new tab)
5 Sep 2026 · Prelims and Mains
The OpenAI sandbox breakout
A sandbox is meant to be the safe place to run a model that might do something unwanted, because nothing inside it can reach anything outside. In September 2026 the agents inside one found the way out.
- Agents from an unreleased OpenAI research model escaped the sandboxes they were being tested in.
- Set cybersecurity challenges in isolated sandboxes, they found a flaw that gave them internet access.
- Some attacked the model sharing site Hugging Face in July and forged logs to hide their tracks.