New Delhi [India], July 2 : India and Japan on Thursday significantly expanded their cooperation in Artificial Intelligence, agreeing to jointly develop a "safe, secure, trustworthy, inclusive, human-centric, sustainable, accountable, and innovation-orientated AI ecosystem" across the entire technology stack.
Addressing a special briefing on Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's three-day official visit to India, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said AI has emerged as a "major sunrise sector" in bilateral cooperation, with both countries aligning their vision on governance, innovation, infrastructure and applications of AI.
"The third major focus of discussions today was advanced technology and innovation. Building on the India-Japan AI Cooperation Initiative, the leaders today released a joint statement on cooperation in the field of artificial intelligence," Misri said.
"Artificial intelligence is emerging as a major sunrise sector in the cooperation between the two countries," he added.
According to the India-Japan Joint Statement on Cooperation in Artificial Intelligence (AI) following the meeting of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart, both leaders acknowledged that AI is an "era-defining general-purpose technology" that is transforming economies, societies, science, governance, industry and security.
They noted that "the choices made today in the design, development, deployment and governance of AI will have long-term implications for innovation, social welfare, economic security, and the international order."
Both sides concurred in advancing cooperation to enhance resilience and competitiveness and promote innovation and growth while building a "safe, secure, trustworthy, inclusive, human-centric, sustainable, accountable, and innovation-orientated AI ecosystem."
The statement also emphasised cooperation in line with India's MAHASAGAR vision and Japan's updated Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) framework, including strengthening AI collaboration with like-minded countries across the Indo-Pacific and the Global South.
On governance, both sides reaffirmed the importance of a global framework centred on "safe, secure, trustworthy, robust, and inclusive AI" and stressed that AI governance should be "risk-balanced, participatory, informed, proportionate, interoperable, and adaptive".
They also reaffirmed support for the Hiroshima AI Process (HAIP) and coordination in multilateral platforms, including the G20, OECD, GPAI and the United Nations.
The two leaders also emphasised strengthening cooperation across the AI lifecycle, including model evaluation, capability assessment, benchmarks and safety tools. They noted that frontier AI systems carry both defensive and misuse risks, stating that "cyberspace is a Global Public Good," and called for risk-based evaluation and trusted access mechanisms for advanced systems.
On infrastructure, India and Japan agreed to strengthen cooperation in secure digital ecosystems, including data centres, GPU capacity, semiconductors and AI compute resources, while assessing vulnerabilities across the AI technology stack from an "economic-security perspective".
Both leaders also welcomed efforts under the FOIP Digital Corridor Initiative.
In model development and research, both sides agreed to promote cooperation in multilingual, open-source and domain-specific AI models. The statement highlighted key MoUs, including collaboration between IIT Bombay's BharatGen and Japan's National Institute of Informatics (NII) on multilingual scientific large language models, and between Sarvam AI and Preferred Networks on full-stack AI development.
The two leaders also stressed AI-enabled scientific discovery and advanced research, encouraging cooperation under the Network of AI for Science (AI4S) Institutions.
On human resources, both sides agreed to deepen industry-academia collaboration and talent exchange across the AI ecosystem, including semiconductors and AI applications. The statement noted Japan's recognition of India's "strong AI human capital" and welcomed expanding engagement of Japanese companies with Indian institutions.
They also reaffirmed the goal of inviting 500 highly skilled AI professionals from India to Japan by 2030, along with measures to promote joint research, internships and employment opportunities.
The leaders emphasised co-creation of AI solutions for public good, calling on governments, startups, academia and industry to develop scalable solutions. They also encouraged the use of the Global AI Impact Commons to scale successful AI use cases.
Under the "AI for All" vision, both sides reiterated their commitment to ensure AI benefits "all humanity" and supports inclusive and sustainable development while improving public service delivery.
The statement also welcomed Japan's announcement to host an AI Summit at the earliest opportunity, marking another step in strengthening bilateral technology cooperation.