Govt Approval Needed for AI Model Launch, Says Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar

The Government of India has asked artificial intelligence platforms for approval before launching an AI product in the country. On March 2, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that all AI platforms seek its permission before launching their products.

The moves come after a response from Google’s Gemini model to a question of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which is a fascist generated controversy.  I

In an advisory issued to intermediaries/platforms on March 1, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology warned of criminal action in cases of non-compliance. “All intermediaries or platforms to ensure that use of Artificial Intelligence, /LLM/Generative AI, software(s) or algorithm(s) on or through its computer resource does not permit its users to host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, store, update or share any unlawful content,” the advisory said.

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According to the guidelines provided, all intermediaries have been told to ensure compliance with the advisory, which was issued on March 1 evening,  with immediate effect and to submit an action taken-cum-status report to the ministry within 15 days.

“This signals that we are moving to a regime when a lot of rigour is needed before a product is launched. You don’t do that with cars or microprocessors. Why is that for such a transformative tech like AI there are no guardrails between what is in the lab and what goes out to the public,” the minister of state for electronics and information technology said.

The government has also advised that AI-generated content be labeled or embedded with a permanent unique metadata or identifier to be able to determine the creator or the first originator of any misinformation or a deepfake.

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“If they want to deploy an error-prone model, they have to label it as under testing, take government permission, and explicitly seek confirmation and consent of the user that it is an error-prone platform. They can’t come back later and say it is under testing,” the minister added.

“These are direct violations of Rule 3(1)(b) of Intermediary Rules (IT rules) of the IT act and violations of several provisions of the Criminal code,” Chandrasekhar had said at that time. The rules list out the types of content that are prohibited from being published on platforms.

In a statement, a Google spokesperson said, “We’ve worked quickly to address this issue. Gemini is built as a creativity and productivity tool and may not always be reliable, especially when it comes to responding to some prompts about current events, political topics, or evolving news. This is something that we’re constantly working on improving.” 

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