The Indian Ministry of Defence has inked a five-year agreement with generative AI startup Sarvam to integrate advanced artificial intelligence capabilities across the Army, Navy, and Air Force. The partnership establishes a unified framework to improve battlefield decision-making, target acquisition, and surveillance data processing using sovereign Indian technology. Through its national security division, Sarvam will provide foundation models and technical support while ensuring human oversight remains central to all operational military decisions.

The Indian Ministry of Defence has inked a five-year agreement with generative AI startup Sarvam to integrate advanced artificial intelligence capabilities across the Army, Navy, and Air Force. The partnership establishes a unified framework to improve battlefield decision-making, target acquisition, and surveillance data processing using sovereign Indian technology. Through its national security division, Sarvam will provide foundation models and technical support while ensuring human oversight remains central to all operational military decisions.

The Indian Ministry of Defence has inked a five-year agreement with generative AI startup Sarvam to integrate advanced artificial intelligence capabilities across the Army, Navy, and Air Force. The partnership establishes a unified framework to improve battlefield decision-making, target acquisition, and surveillance data processing using sovereign Indian technology. Through its national security division, Sarvam will provide foundation models and technical support while ensuring human oversight remains central to all operational military decisions.

The Indian Army, Navy and Air Force are set to strengthen their artificial intelligence capabilities as the defence ministry inked a five-year agreement with Bengaluru-based generative artificial intelligence startup, Sarvam.

The memorandum of understanding (MoU), signed between the company and Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff (HQ IDS), sets up a common framework for developing and deploying AI applications across the three services, aimed at improving battlefield decision-making, target acquisition, surveillance-related data processing and operational effectiveness.

"The framework also extends to the joint, tri-service, and integrated organisations under HQ IDS," the release said.

Under the agreement, Sarvam will design, develop and deploy AI applications catering to operational, training and decision-support requirements of the armed forces, besides providing technical support.

The framework will give all three services access to common AI foundation models, agentic infrastructure, geospatial systems and perception technologies. This will allow AI capabilities developed for one service to be adapted and deployed across the others, while lessons learned from individual projects can benefit the wider armed forces.

"The focus areas are decision support, target acquisition and data fusion across the sensor-to-shooter loop, with human oversight retained on operational decisions, so that the AI layer for the Services is built in India and deployed on sovereign infrastructure," the release added.

The MoU advances the defence ministry's direction on military AI: India's armed forces are building their own AI layer that runs across the services, developed with Indian partners.

The projects will be implemented through Chanakya, Sarvam's dedicated national security and defence division.

Sarvam will also provide technical support for the applications developed under the five-year agreement.

"Sarvam exists to build AI in India, for India. The core of that mission is to put the country's own intelligence into the systems it depends on," company co-founder Pratyush Kumar said.

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