India-Japan AI Cooperation Framework
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae of Japan have issued a comprehensive joint statement advancing bilateral cooperation in Artificial Intelligence, recognizing AI as an era-defining technology transforming economies, societies, and governance. The agreement aims to mutually enhance resilience and competitiveness while building a safe, secure, trustworthy, inclusive, human-centric, sustainable, accountable, and innovation-oriented AI ecosystem.
International AI Governance and Cybersecurity Cooperation
The leaders reaffirmed the importance of an international governance framework centered on safe, secure, and trustworthy AI that supports responsible innovation while respecting national laws and priorities. They emphasized risk-balanced, participatory, and interoperable AI governance, highlighting the significance of the Hiroshima AI Process (HAIP) including its international guiding principles and codes of conduct for advanced AI systems. Both countries will strengthen coordination in international forums including G20, OECD, Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), and the United Nations, particularly through the Hiroshima AI Process Friends Group and Partners Community. They committed to promoting implementation of the Hiroshima AI Process Friends Group Action Plan 2026 with greater participation from the Global South and private sector.
The cooperation will include strengthening safe design, development, deployment, and use of AI throughout its full lifecycle, including AI model evaluation, capability assessment, guidelines, tools, and benchmarks. Institutions are encouraged to collaborate through Trusted AI Commons, a platform announced during the India AI Impact Summit that consolidates technical resources and best practices. The leaders specifically addressed cybersecurity concerns, recognizing that frontier AI models possess advanced cyber capabilities that can strengthen defenders while creating misuse risks. They underlined the need for risk-based evaluation, controlled release, and trusted access arrangements attentive to legitimate cyber-defense needs, with particular attention to critical infrastructure. Child safety protection was emphasized as essential to ensuring AI serves as a means of learning rather than harm.
Infrastructure Development and Research Collaboration
The two leaders committed to elevating India and Japan as strategic research and development partners in AI, focusing on building resilient, diversified, and trustworthy supply chains of the AI technology stack. Cooperation will include secure digital infrastructure development encompassing data centers, GPU and other compute resources, and semiconductors, with joint assessment of opportunities and vulnerabilities from an economic-security perspective. The FOIP Digital Corridor Initiative will be advanced to strengthen digital connectivity and resilient AI supply chains.
Several significant memorandums were signed to foster deeper collaboration: a Memorandum of Understanding between Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, BharatGen Technology Foundation, and National Institute of Informatics (NII/ROIS) for joint research and development of large language models (LLMs); a MOU between Sarvam and Preferred Networks for cooperation across the full AI technology stack; and a Memorandum of Cooperation between India AI and Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) to support AI development companies from both countries.
Human Resources Exchange and Talent Development
The leaders reaffirmed the strategic importance of deepening research cooperation through joint projects and researcher exchanges. They committed to strengthening industrial competitiveness by engaging in human resource exchanges through industry-academia collaboration across the entire AI stack from semiconductors to applications. Recognizing India's strong AI human capital, they welcomed growing engagement of Japanese companies with India's higher education institutions and technology talent. Concrete measures include encouraging Japanese companies to expand AI-related R&D, innovation, and industry partnerships in India while supporting professional development and mobility of Indian talent to Japan through joint research, internships, employment opportunities, and other pathways. Specifically, they reaffirmed the goal from the January 2026 India-Japan Foreign Ministers' Strategic Dialogue of inviting 500 highly skilled AI professionals from India to Japan by 2030 and promoting joint research.
AI for All Initiative and Global Cooperation
The leaders endorsed the 'AI for All' vision from the New Delhi Declaration adopted at the India AI Impact Summit, reaffirming commitment to AI benefiting all humanity for inclusive and sustainable development while improving public service delivery. They will work with like-minded countries and partners to support AI capacity building, technical assistance, knowledge sharing, and use-case replication respecting national laws and priorities. Prime Minister Modi supported Prime Minister Takaichi's announcement that Japan will host the next AI Summit at the earliest opportunity.