AI Summit - Day 2 – 17th Feb 2026

Day 2 kicked off with the same electricity and momentum as Day 1 — and rightly so. We’re living through one of those rare moments in history when a technology doesn’t just evolve, it reshapes everything. Electricity did that. The internet did that. And now, AI is doing it again — only faster, louder, and with a ripple effect that’s touching every industry, every job, and every nation at once.

AI is a force multiplier — the kind of shift that can unlock creativity at scale, supercharge productivity, and accelerate the growth curve of entire economies.

Let us start with today’s legal and policy discourse highlights, India’s AI transition raises a series of urgent legal challenges. The government is prioritising a techno‑legal regulatory model to address harms such as deepfakes, privacy violations, and AI‑enabled cybercrime. Strengthening enforcement remains difficult due to limited cyber‑forensic capacity, making prevention, deterrent cyber laws, and public–private intelligence sharing essential. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 provides rights to access and erase data, but its effectiveness depends on operational enforcement.

Synthetic media presents significant legal gaps. India’s evolving framework emphasises accountability and verifiability, reflected in amendments to the Intermediary Guidelines requiring platforms to act against impersonation and harmful AI content and discussions underway on age-based safeguards for social media. India’s legislative approach to synthetic media reflects this shift: the focus is moving from mere content moderation to accountability, verifiability, and citizen‑centric protections. When a person’s likeness or voice is misused, it is the citizen — not the platform — who suffers reputational harm, underscoring the need for legal frameworks that prioritise individual rights. It is to be noted MEITY has amended its Intermediary Guidelines to ensure accountability by platforms.

In governance, India is adopting a principles‑based, industry‑aligned regulatory approach, avoiding overly prescriptive rules that could stifle innovation. As AI scales, AI assurance — measurable, auditable evidence of safety — will become central to compliance, liability allocation, and cross‑border interoperability.

Now, lets deep dive- 

HON’BLE MINISTER OF IT, SHRI ASHWINI VAISHNAV CHARTS THE WAY FORWARD

The Hon’ble Minister addressed the media and shared key vision and roadmap of the government along with some significant data and numbers on where the AI trajectory is moving in India.

Key highlights included -

• The Minister positioned AI as the “fifth industrial revolution,” stating India aims to move from digital success to becoming a global AI powerhouse.
  

• India is adopting the mantra of “AI for all” for greater inclusivity and benefits.
  

• India expects $200+ billion in AI investments within the next two years, covering the full AI stack: infrastructure, compute, models, applications, and talent.
  

• There is also a major push for AI compute sovereignty with 50,000+ GPUs to be deployed in 6 months and a target of 100,000+ GPUs by year-end; expansion of data centres and shared compute facilities; clean energy and research to address AI’s power and water demands
  

• There is also a strong focus on building sovereign AI models trained on Indian data, languages and cultural context.
  

• He also emphasized that Global tech companies are expected to comply with India’s legal and cultural framework.
  

• The Minister also addressed the AI governance and safety concerns and highlighted – the need for a techno-legal approach to AI regulation; strong action against deepfakes and harmful AI content; mandatory labelling of AI-generated content already introduced; discussions underway on age-based safeguards for social media; and emphasis on protecting children, society and democratic systems.
  

• The government is also preparing to launch India AI Mission 2.0, which will focus on research and innovation.
  

• Under the India AI Mission 2.0, the Minister also unveiled plans for rolling out an ‘AI ka UPI’ platform which will be a trusted interoperable AI platform inspired by India’s digital public infrastructure success, aimed at enabling AI applications in sectors such as healthcare, education, and MSMEs.
  

• AI is expected to play a major role in defence and strategic technologies, creative and media economy under the “Create in India” push, public services and governance transformation.

  
  

AI for Secure India : Countering Cybercrime, Deepfakes, and Building Trust in Synthetic Media

As AI advances, so do the methods used by cybercriminals. India is witnessing a rapid rise in AI‑driven threats — from sophisticated cyber fraud to hyper‑realistic deepfakes — making attribution and enforcement increasingly difficult. Law enforcement agencies already face constraints due to low police‑to‑population ratios and limited cyber‑forensics capacity. While the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 creates essential rights such as access and erasure, and sets regulatory guardrails, enforcement and on‑ground capability still need significant strengthening.

Deepfakes have quickly emerged as a major national challenge. Since no AI model can reliably detect manipulated media at scale, human verification, cross‑checking sources, and digital skepticism remain indispensable. Hence, human in the loop is paramount. Prevention is becoming the strongest defence. Citizens must be encouraged to verify information, especially in the face of intimidation-based scams like “digital arrests.” Equally important is ongoing public awareness, stronger public–private intelligence sharing, and cyber laws that are both robust and deterrent.

There is thus a growing concern around synthetic media and its impact on public trust. The discussion highlighted that combating misinformation requires both technological standards and institutional collaboration. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) offers one promising avenue — creating cryptographically signed metadata that acts as a “digital nutrition label” for media, enabling verification of provenance and integrity. While not a complete solution, it is significantly stronger than current reactive mechanisms.

Speakers emphasised the need to understand the “digital history” of all online content. As AI tools increasingly manipulate images, audio, and video, the ecosystem must scale tools capable of detecting AI‑generated material and preserving content credentials. India’s legislative approach to synthetic media reflects this shift: the focus is moving from mere content moderation to accountability, verifiability, and citizen‑centric protections. When a person’s likeness or voice is misused, it is the citizen — not the platform — who suffers reputational harm, underscoring the need for legal frameworks that prioritise individual rights. It is to be noted MEITY has amended its Intermediary Guidelines to ensure accountability by platforms.

Regulation, however, must remain principles‑based rather than overly prescriptive, allowing industries the flexibility to develop context‑appropriate solutions. Public‑private collaboration is essential, as no single entity — government, platform, or consumer — can address synthetic media risks alone.

Across both cybercrime and synthetic media, the message is clear: India’s AI security strategy must combine prevention, accountability, technological standards, and citizen awareness. As AI continues to blur the boundary between real and synthetic, trust will become the central currency — and safeguarding that trust will require proactive, coordinated, and transparent governance.

AI Governance holds the key

How do compute, energy, and talent translate into real AI capability? The consensus was that compute alone is insufficient. Effective capability depends equally on open and interoperable enterprise stacks, access to reliable models, and skilled talent able to use the infrastructure meaningfully.

A major theme was the global rise of Sovereign AI—government‑backed initiatives aimed at reducing dependency on foreign models and ensuring strategic autonomy over data and compute. These efforts prioritize national datasets, indigenous model development, and GPU‑based infrastructure. India has begun progressing on this path, similar to South Korea, Taiwan, and Sweden, signalling a shift toward a multi‑polar AI ecosystem rather than a US‑China duopoly.

Speakers stressed that scaling AI is inseparable from values and governance. Drawing on the idea of “constitutional AI,” the panel underscored the need for clear decision‑making frameworks, alignment across technology, energy and human capital, and regulatory environments that support responsible innovation — particularly around copyright, data access, and sharing.

There was broad agreement that existing knowledge is insufficient to justify exhaustive regulation. Governance should emphasize trust, agility, and co‑regulation, rather than rigid compliance. The EU AI Act was cited as a cautionary example, where early regulatory caution slowed experimentation. India’s hybrid governance model — positioned between the EU’s risk‑heavy regime and the US’s principles‑first approach — was highlighted as a balanced, industry‑aligned pathway.

A significant shift discussed was the move from broad ethical principles to AI assurance — the process of converting Responsible AI principles into measurable, auditable evidence. Assurance is increasingly necessary as AI tools reach non‑expert users. Examples of inadvertent privacy exposures illustrate why traditional governance approaches are insufficient. Assurance must evolve alongside capability, rooted in risk assessment, documentation, and auditability.

Frameworks such as NIST AI RMF 2.0 and emerging ISO AI assurance standards are becoming influential, though no single framework fits all use cases. Certain sectors — finance, healthcare, critical infrastructure, defence — demonstrate that mature governance enables, rather than restricts, innovation.

For India, early adoption of assurance practices is essential. The panel recommended treating assurance as a product capability, not a compliance burden, and aligning with global frameworks while accommodating India’s linguistic and contextual diversity. Opportunities in UK–India collaboration include shared standards, shared skills, and shared evidence frameworks.

The closing message for AI builders was simple:

• Embed assurance from the start

• Build verifiable evidence of trust

• Treat assurance as “by design,” not paperwork

On 2^nd day of Digital AI Summit, Sarvada Legal attended the following sessions:

• Hon’ble minister of IT, Shri Ashwini Vaishnav – day 2 press conference

• AI DPI Sandbox: co-creating the future

• AI for secure India: counterfeit, cyber crimes and deep fakes

• Scaling enterprise transformation - how India can leapfrog in the AI economy

• AI competitiveness and innovation: from insight to action

• Global AI assurance and standards: from principles to proof

• Governing autonomy: Agentic AI, multi-agent systems, and the infrastructure of trust

• AI for our oceans of tomorrow: data, models and governance

• Building trust in the age of synthetic media

• AI for the global south: from governance to inclusion

• AI and the Future of Creativity: Power and Public Imagination

Please feel free to reach out to our Team to discuss any of the Technology Law, Competition Law, International Trade and Policy Issues.