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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
Showing 5 of 7 subjects, those that changed from 16 to 31 July 2026.Show all
Deepfake labelling rules
Copy link to Deepfake labelling rulesPrelims 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.
What changed
6 Aug 2026
PIB, 6 Aug 2026: Deepfakes: labelling rules and three-hour takedown (opens in a new tab)
30 Jul 2026Updatealso in news
- Thirteen responsible AI projects are running 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
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.
What changed
2 Sep 2026
24 Jul 2026Update
- 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, because training supplies the work to no third party.
- It took the same view of outputs produced by retrieval augmented generation. The ruling is interim.
- Fair dealing is the limited set of uses of a copyrighted work that Indian law allows without the owner's consent, such as research and reporting.
Global governance of artificial intelligence
Copy link to Global governance of artificial intelligencePrelims 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.
What changed
12 Sep 2026
2 Sep 2026
20 Jul 2026Update
- China launched the World AI Cooperation Organisation with 29 other countries, including Russia and Pakistan, as an alternative for developing countries to Western frameworks built around safety and ethics.
A proposed law on AI
Copy link to A proposed law on AIPrelims 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.
What changed
22 Jul 2026New subject
- 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.
Rome Declaration
Copy link to Rome DeclarationPrelims 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.
What changed
23 Jul 2026New subjectalso in news
- Nobel laureates, AI scientists and religious leaders called for a treaty barring autonomous systems from nuclear launch decisions. Its core is meaningful human control, meaning a human and not an algorithm makes the final decision to use lethal force.