India can export AI trust as a service and become the world’s auditor

For years, the tech world has operated under a binary myth: either innovate fast and break things, or regulate and fall behind. But at the AI Impact Summit in Bharat Mandapam, a different narrative emerged. If the first era of India’s tech story was about service exports, and the second was about Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), the third could be about trust.

As the global AI race accelerates into what experts call “powerful black boxes”, the world is facing an evidence dilemma. The technology is moving faster than our ability to verify it. In this vacuum, India has an opportunity to move from being a consumer of frontier models to becoming a primary global auditor for AI.

Safety as an economic engine

Nicholas Miailhe, Co-founder of AI Safety Connect and CEO of PRISM Eval, argued that India’s regulatory stance, specifically the recent IT Ministry rules on synthetic content, should not be seen as a roadblock. Instead, he framed it as a prototype for a new, exportable industry.

“These rules are stringent, they're hard to implement,” Miailhe noted during the strategic briefing. “They're an immense case for India to localise positions for new startups and export them because, trust me, these problems are going to be the same in Europe; these problems are going to be the same around the world. Safety is an immense opportunity for innovation because these systems are big black boxes that need to be better understood.”

The market for testing, evaluation, and verification (TEV) technologies is poised to explode. As global companies release systems that still cannot rule out the development of bio-weapons or sophisticated cyber-attacks, the demand for independent inspectors will only rise.

Collective market power

Another striking takeaway was the leverage middle powers can possess when they act as a demand-side bloc. Mark from the Future of Life Institute cited the 2023 “Italy Effect” as a blueprint for Indian agency.

“A really notable moment for me was when Italy, by itself, decided to ban ChatGPT in 2023. Within one week, data controls were introduced on the OpenAI strategy. And now everyone in the world can delete their conversation history thanks to that Italian move alone because OpenAI didn't want to lose the Italian market.”

Mark’s pitch to India is rooted in collective bargaining. If India, Brazil, and Europe band together to set safety standards, they do not just follow the rules set in San Francisco or Beijing. They could influence them. This collective agency, the argument goes, helps ensure AI models are “predictable, reliable, and beneficial” for the world’s majority population, rather than optimised only for the commercial imperatives of frontier labs.

The rise of the auditor

While Silicon Valley pours billions into the “next big model”, a strategic gap has opened in the algorithmic safety layer. India’s success with DPI, like UPI and Aadhaar, has already shown its ability to build reliable, large-scale systems for public good outcomes.

The panel suggested India could leverage this “DPI DNA” to lead in:

• Multilingual standards, ensuring AI works safely in regional dialects, not just English.

• Reliability certification, creating the equivalent of “medical qualifications” for AI health tools.

• Sovereign testing, building domestic labs to verify that foreign AI does not carry hidden biases or security backdoors.

Protecting the industrial world

We are shifting from an economy of innovation to an economy of a new industrial world. As AI begins to automate critical sectors like IT infrastructure, the stakes of a malfunction move from a minor glitch to a national economic crisis.

And here, by positioning itself as a leader in AI safety, India is not only protecting its citizens. It is building the digital public infrastructure of trust.