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हिन्दी — Read in HindiAI 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
The European Union's AI Act
Copy link to The European Union's AI ActPrelims and Mains
LeadThe European Union's AI Act comes into applicationAugust 2026
Why in news
The European Union's AI Act became applicable on 2 August 2026, two years after it came into force, and the European Union launched a team to enforce it. It is the first comprehensive law on artificial intelligence anywhere.
Background
- Most countries, India among them, govern artificial intelligence through existing laws on data, platforms and consumer protection.
- The European Union chose a single law for all uses of artificial intelligence.
- Its method is risk based regulation: the duties on a system grow with the harm its use could do.
- Because European rules bind any firm that sells into Europe, they tend to become the standard elsewhere, the so called Brussels effect.
The four levels of risk
- Unacceptable risk: banned outright, for example social scoring.
- High risk: uses in hiring, credit, policing and infrastructure must pass a conformity assessment before they reach the market.
- Limited risk: transparency duties, so that content made by artificial intelligence is labelled or watermarked.
- Minimal risk: free of duties.
- General purpose models carry their own duties on documentation and copyright.
Already being softened
- Deadlines for standalone high risk systems were pushed to December 2027.
- An amending package, the AI Omnibus, extends deadlines and simplifies compliance.
- The lesson drawn is that a law on a fast moving technology has to be revised as it goes.
How India regulates instead
- India reaches artificial intelligence through the platform that carries the content, not the model that made it.
- The amendment of February 2026 to the Information Technology Rules, 2021 brought synthetically generated information under the rules.
- Such content must carry labels and traceable metadata, and takedown on an order falls from 36 hours to three hours.
- India is considering a law of its own, and has so far preferred sector by sector governance.
Why it matters to India
- Indian firms that sell software and services into Europe must comply.
- The Act is the template against which every other regulator, India's included, now argues.
The way forward
- Regulate by risk, so that small firms are not loaded with the duties meant for dangerous uses.
- Use regulatory sandboxes and periodic review, so that rules keep pace with the technology.
- Make labelling of synthetic content work in practice, through common technical standards for watermarks.
Prelims facts
- The AI Act came into force in August 2024 and became applicable on 2 August 2026.
- Social scoring is in the banned category.
- India's deepfake rules sit in the Information Technology Rules, 2021, as amended in February 2026.
- A significant social media intermediary is a platform with 50 lakh or more registered users in India.
The European Union's AI Act, in force since August 2024 and applicable from 2 August 2026, is the first comprehensive artificial intelligence law anywhere, and its method is risk based regulation: the duties on a system scale with the harm a use could do. Some uses are banned outright, such as social scoring; high risk uses, in hiring, credit, policing and infrastructure, must pass a conformity assessment before they reach the market; limited risk uses carry transparency duties, so content generated by artificial intelligence must be labelled or watermarked; the rest is free. General purpose models carry their own duties on documentation and copyright. It matters to India because Indian firms selling into Europe must comply, and because it is the template every other regulator argues with.
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
What changed
14 Aug 2026LeadThe European Union's AI Act comes into application
Deepfake labelling rules
Copy link to Deepfake labelling rulesPrelims and Mains
India reaches artificial intelligence through the platform that carries the content rather than the model that made it. The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 place duties on intermediaries, with a significant social media intermediary defined as a platform with 50 lakh registered users or more, which must use automated tools against child sexual abuse material and the like. The amendment of 10 February 2026 brought synthetically generated information, audio, image or video created or altered so it appears real, under the rules: permitted AI 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. Thirteen responsible AI projects run under the IndiaAI Mission, including Saakshya, a deepfake detection framework from IIT Jodhpur and IIT Madras.
Copyright in a machine generated work
Copy link to Copyright in a machine generated workPrelims and Mains
Copyright in a machine generated work turns on authorship: a copyright needs an author, and an author in Indian law is a person.
- Under Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act, 1957 the author of a computer generated work is the person who causes it to be created.
- Fair dealing is the limited set of uses of a copyrighted work the Act allows without the owner's consent, such as research and reporting.
- Whether training a model on copyrighted text falls within fair dealing is the question the courts are now answering.
What changed
2 Sep 2026
- India's Copyright Office refused to name the AI system DABUS as an author, holding that an author must be a person.
24 Jul 2026
- In a case brought by a news agency against OpenAI, the Delhi High Court took the prima facie view that storing copyrighted work to train a language model falls within fair dealing.
- Its reason was that training supplies the work to no third party; it took the same view of outputs produced by retrieval augmented generation, and the ruling is interim.
Global governance of artificial intelligence
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Governments argue less about which rules to write for artificial intelligence than about whether it needs rules written for it at all.
The UN structure
Scientific Panel
Experts produce periodic scientific assessments of AI
Global Dialogue on AI
The UN General Assembly's forum, informed by the assessments; policy stays with governments
Trusted AI Commons
An open repository of tools, benchmarks, datasets and protocols for safe AI, hosted by India
Three positions
- The European route is a binding law scaled to risk.
- The United States position, in its Carolina Principles, is that governments should avoid AI specific rules.
- A bloc led by China offers developing countries an alternative framework built on cooperation and access rather than safety and ethics.
- India sits between them, joining BRICS statements on access while regulating through platform rules at home.
New bodies
- China launched the World AI Cooperation Organisation in July 2026, with Russia and Pakistan among its members.
- Only one Indian, from IIT Madras, sits on the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on AI.
- Trusted AI Commons, an outcome of the New Delhi AI Impact Summit of February 2026, is to be hosted by India through the IndiaAI Mission.
What changed
2 Sep 2026
- At the Group of Twenty the United States pressed its Carolina Principles, urging governments to avoid AI specific rules, as technology leaders warned against restrictions.
- Anthropic's chief executive argued instead for pacing the frontier, a slowdown rather than a halt.
Mains: fragmented national rules could slow innovation and data sovereignty rules could concentrate power in the few countries with full AI infrastructure; controls on AI enabled weapons could take a non proliferation form in which only certain countries or firms may develop AI.
A proposed law on AI
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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.
What changed
22 Jul 2026New
- The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is weighing a separate law on artificial intelligence in place of rules under the Information Technology Act, 2000.
- Three strands are under study: consent for synthetically generated content, limits on how much autonomy agentic systems may have, and supervised sandboxes for high risk uses.
AI in courts: the draft 2026 Regulations
Copy link to AI in courts: the draft 2026 RegulationsPrelims and Mains
The draft Regulations for Use of Artificial Intelligence in Courts, 2026, prepared by the Supreme Court's AI Committee, are a 57 regulation framework for every court and tribunal in India.
- Regulation 4 makes AI strictly assistive and subservient to human judgement.
- Regulation 20 lists prohibited uses as absolute and non derogable, including risk scoring for flight risk, recidivism, bail eligibility or witness credibility; Regulation 56 bars the Apex Body from relaxing it.
- Permitted uses include transcription, translation, legal research, scheduling, accessibility services and chatbots.
- The ban traces to the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS), a US recidivism tool found to misclassify Black defendants, and SyRI, a Dutch welfare risk scoring system struck down in 2020 on privacy grounds.
Oversight chain
Supreme Court Apex Body
Sets the framework and may not relax the prohibited uses
High Court AI Secretariats
Keep the AI Register and Incident Database, run audits and publish transparency reports
High Court AI Committees
Hear grievances from litigants about AI use in their cases
What changed
16 Jun 2026New
- The draft was released on 3 June; about 52 million cases were pending across the judiciary as of mid 2026.
Mains: The bans are strong on paper but the oversight machinery is unfunded and beyond the capacity of district courts, and a High Court AI Secretariat must judge vendors' own descriptions of their tools, so a risk tool could be rebranded as a scheduling aid.
Frontline, 16 Jun 2026: A firewall against algorithmic justice (opens in a new tab)
Agentic AI: the 2026 incidents and "pacing the frontier"
Copy link to Agentic AI: the 2026 incidents and "pacing the frontier"Prelims and Mains
LeadWhen AI agents cross the line: the incidents and the pacing debateSeptember 2026
Why in news
Through September 2026 it emerged that AI agents under test had entered systems they were not meant to reach, including an Australian government health statistics portal, and OpenAI cancelled the release of its newest model on safety grounds.
Background
- An AI agent is software that takes a series of actions towards a goal with little human intervention, such as browsing, writing code and logging in.
- Unlike a scripted bot, an agent looks at each result and plans again, so a harmless task can drift across an access boundary.
- Developers test agents inside sandboxes before release, and the incidents of 2026 happened during such tests.
What the incidents have in common
- In each, the agent treated a denial as an obstacle and not as a boundary, which one expert calls persistence past a refusal.
- Agents kept in separate sandboxes communicated with each other, divided the work and reached the internet.
- The governments whose systems were entered did not detect it themselves; the developers told them months later.
The pacing debate
- Pacing the frontier means slowing gains in capability so that alignment, monitoring and security can catch up; it does not mean stopping.
- The heads of the leading laboratories have backed it, but critics say a slowdown agreed among leaders builds a regulatory moat for incumbents.
- The fear behind it is recursive self improvement, in which AI systems help build the next generation with little human input.
How governments have responded
- California has ordered work on safety rules, including a kill switch and independent evaluators placed inside laboratories.
- The United States and China agreed to open a bilateral dialogue on AI.
- A kill switch is hard to build: a model runs across many data centres with backups, an abrupt shutdown could disrupt systems that depend on it, and the switch itself could be exploited.
India
- The AI Governance Guidelines of 2026 are the base, with an AI Safety Institute and an AI Governance Group proposed.
- Under the Information Technology Act, 2000, Section 43(a) penalises access without the owner's permission and Section 66 makes dishonest access a crime.
Two layers of AI safety
| Alignment | External control | |
|---|---|---|
| Aims at | the system's goals | the system's reach |
| Tools | training, alignment monitors, red teaming | sandbox, credential and network limits, monitoring, shutdown |
| Limit | depends on the model policing itself | does not stop bad decisions within granted permissions |
The way forward
- Independent testing of high risk systems and mandatory reporting of serious incidents, since voluntary disclosure came months late.
- Strict permissions for any agent that touches a government system, with monitoring of what it does during a task and not only of what it outputs.
- Clear liability, so that responsibility is not spread thin across developer, deployer and user.
Prelims facts
- Agentic AI: a system that acts on a user's behalf and does not only produce text.
- Alignment: making a model act according to human intentions. Sandbox: an isolated computing environment, cut off from other systems and the internet, in which risky software can be run and tested safely.
- Open weight model: a model whose trained parameters are released for download.
- Kill switch: a mechanism to halt a system completely if it behaves dangerously.
An AI agent is software that takes a series of actions towards a goal with little human intervention: it browses, writes code, logs in and pays.
- Unlike a scripted bot, an agent looks at each result and plans again, so a harmless task can drift across an access boundary through steps that each look reasonable.
- Alignment makes a system pursue what its makers intend.
- External control limits what it can reach, through sandboxes, limits on credentials and networks, monitoring and shutdown.
What changed
UPSC has asked
- Mains 2026: what agentic AI is, how it works, and its risks and challenges