NEW DELHI: India is engaging with the industry to identify the right technical and legal structures to ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) does not infringe upon the copyrights of content creators, said Minister of Electronics and IT (MeitY) Ashwini Vaishnaw on Monday.
The minister, in a conversation with American media mogul and former diplomat Charles Rivkin at the AI Impact Summit 2026, also mentioned that India is seeking a global consensus on the copyright issue. He said that protecting intellectual property rights while training AI models would require techno-legal solutions shaped through close engagement with the industry and consensus-building at the global level.
“Would a simple regulation do that? Probably, no. That would require a lot of consensus building and technological tools to be created. … We are closely engaging with the industry to find out the right technical and legal structures for this. And this is something which will have to be taken up at a global level – this will require a consensus building across different countries,” he said.
Foundational models, including large language models (LLMs) and small language models (SLMs), are trained on existing content such as books, newspapers, journals, and other published material, some of which may be protected by copyright.
In recent years, the rapid growth of AI chatbots has led to tensions with authors, news organisations, and other content creators. Many allege that AI companies have used copyrighted material without permission to train their models and improve their competitive edge.
These concerns have resulted in copyright infringement lawsuits, including class-action cases. At the same time, some organisations — including news agencies — have entered into licensing agreements with AI companies as an interim solution.
The minister also announced the launch of the “Create in India” mission, which will focus on strengthening the country’s creative economy while embedding responsible AI practices into its growth story. He said that the government will launch the Create in India mission, on the lines of the semiconductor mission. The initiative will be industry-oriented, employment-oriented, and future-oriented.
“We believe in the value that creators bring, through their content and their unique ways of telling stories,” he added.