India should build its own AI models, says chief of India's AI mission

India should develop its own artificial intelligence (AI) models and its own solutions, chief of India’s AI mission said Wednesday while cautioning against becoming a fodder for the global AI biggies.

 

Abhishek Singh, additional secretary and CEO of the IndiaAI Mission, said the rush of global AI firms to India not only underscores the country’s scale but also highlights the need for the country to build its own models.

 

“India is seen as a country with a large number of AI users. What happens is when you end up being only a user, you end up contributing your datasets and your knowledge to these models and help them get better,” he said.

 

Singh added, “Till India builds its own AI models and its own solutions, we have no choice but to be dependent on what is available.”

 

He was talking at a fireside session at the Global Fintech Fest 2025, in Mumbai.

 

“When we do have these models, they will be open sourced and will be available to the developer community within India. It’s very essential that we build our strength in this field and not end up being AI users for the big techs coming to India,” said Singh.

 

On the other hand, India clearly seems to be on the radar of all the major AI firms. After OpenAI announced plans to set up an office in the country, rival Anthropic said on Wednesday that it was expanding its footprint to India. Perplexity, too, was working with telecom major Bharti Airtel.

 

India is emerging as one of the most sought after markets for all these AI tech giants thanks to its over 1 billion internet user base-- the only other largest market after China-- and one of the biggest developer ecosystems. Indian businesses, especially the digital native firms, have been the fastest adopters and experimenters of AI tools.

 

On Tuesday, Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO, Dario Amodei, who is also visiting India this week, said in a statement that India was compelling because of the scale of its technical talent and the commitment from the Indian government to ensure the benefits of artificial intelligence reach all areas of society, not just concentrated pockets.

 

For Claude, Anthropic AI model, India is the second largest user base. Compared to usage in other countries, a disproportionately high amount of Claude usage in India is for technical tasks and software development, such as mobile UI development and web app debugging, according to Anthropic’s recently released Economic Index.

 

The story is true for almost all the players.

 

Earlier this year, OpenAI had announced its plan to open its first India office. The country was ChatGPT’s second-largest and one of the fastest growing markets.

 

India also ranks among the top five developer markets globally on the OpenAI platform. Additionally, it has the largest population of students on ChatGPT worldwide.

 

Meanwhile, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas had said that India has emerged as its largest market. While the company is still setting up its office in India, it has started working with India's telecom major Bharti Airtel.

 

Jaspreet Bindra, co-founder of AI&Beyond, said that global AI companies are coming to India not just for data, but for talent, scale, and a thriving developer ecosystem.

 

“India has one of the world’s largest pools of AI engineers and developers, many of whom have hands-on experience in machine learning, NLP, and generative AI applications,” he said.

 

Bindra also said that India’s growing digital infrastructure, government openness to AI adoption, and massive language diversity makes it an ideal testing ground for scalable, multilingual AI models.

 

“What’s happening is a natural evolution, global AI firms see India not as a back-office or outsourcing hub anymore, but as a strategic innovation partner and future market for AI products and services,” he added.