Hyderabad, 3rd February, 2026: SFLC.in along with VISWAM.ai, FOSS United, and The Linux Foundation, hosted an official India AI Impact Pre-Summit event that brought together policymakers, technologists, journalists, civil society and industry voices. The event was inaugurated by Prof. Sandeep Shukla, Director of International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT Hyderabad).
As part of the consultation, we held two closed-door roundtable discussions on Trust, Safety, and Accountability in AI:
- Harnessing Open Source AI: exploring openness, transparency, safety, licensing, and governance in AI systems.
- Balancing AI Innovation and Copyright: Examining the DPIIT Working Paper on Generative AI and Copyright, including proposed licensing models and their implications for creators and developers.
Across both the roundtables, the participants emphasised that India’s AI future should be focused on openness, accountability and inclusive access. The First roundtable concluded that AI education and skilling initiatives must be grounded in open-source frameworks rather than closed, vendor-controlled models. The principle of ‘public money, public good’ featured prominently during the discussion, with participants questioning when state funding is used to develop AI systems, including whether this should require open weights and transparent methodologies. The roundtable also explored the potential role for public audit mechanisms in assessing whether AI models genuinely serve last-mile communities and advance public-interest objectives. In addition, the roundtable also emphasised data governance as a foundational pillar of India’s AI ecosystem, calling for responsible data sharing of public and domain-specific data with appropriate safeguards to enable education, research and innovation.
