AI governance, safety and ethics

Prelims and Mains

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.

• 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.

Background reading: The Hindu, 1 Aug 2026: EU AI Act becomes applicable (opens in a new tab)

Prelims and Mains

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.

Background reading: 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)

Prelims and Mains

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.

Prelims and Mains

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.

Prelims and Mains

Artificial intelligence in India is governed through rules under the Information Technology Act, 2000, and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has been weighing a separate law covering synthetic content, agentic systems and sandboxes for high risk uses.

Prelims and Mains

The Rome Declaration is a call by Nobel laureates, AI scientists and religious leaders for a treaty keeping autonomous systems out of nuclear launch decisions, on the principle of meaningful human control over the use of lethal force.

Mains

Export controls on artificial intelligence work on scarce hardware such as advanced chips; a model whose weights have been published cannot be withdrawn, which limits what controls on models themselves can do.