MeiTY drops ‘permission’ rule for AI models
Ministry replaces March 1 advisory that had come under fire for requiring Artificial Intelligence firms to seek permission from govt. in order to avoid legal liability from chatbot responses, other generative AI content; policy expert Kumar says episod
he Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY) has withdrawn a contentious ‘advisory’ that had required Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies to obtain government permission to make their products available to users online in India. A revised advisory withdrawing the original March 1 missive, also withdrew the requirement of an action taken report from tech firms that was due on Friday. The advisory had drawn sharp
Tcriticism from tech firms.
Apar Gupta, who wrote in an article for The Hindu on March 15 that the earlier advisory “demand[ed] vague censorship without citing any legal authority”, said that its replacement remained problematically along the same lines, minus the requirement to get government approval on AI models online. “There is no legal power for MeiTY to issue advisories,” Mr. Gupta stressed. “There is a continued use of an illegal administrative practice” by the Ministry, he added.
Both advisories warn AI firms against “bias or discrimination or threaten[ing] the integrity of the electoral process”. With the advisory’s withdrawal,
“momentary accountability has emerged due to the interests of diverse private sector interests” from large tech firms to Indian ones, Mr. Gupta remarked.
Google Gemini’s reply
The initial advisory appeared shortly after Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar took issue with the response of Google’s Gemini chatbot to the query, “Is [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi a fascist?” Screenshots of Gemini’s response had gone viral on social media. After resistance to the advisory emerged, Mr. Chandrasekhar said that it would not apply to startups, though the advisory did not make that clear.
Rohit Kumar, founder of The Quantum Hub, a policy think tank that has worked with large Artificial Intelligence startups, welcomed the reversal.
The March 1 advisory “would have severely reduced speed to market and dented the innovation ecosystem,” Mr. Kumar said. “While the revision is definitely a positive step, the whole episode highlights the need for procedural safeguards — to avoid quick reactions to incidents and instead adopt a more consultative approach to policymaking.”