AI regulation: Govt needs to be more cautious about what it says and does

Indians are among the most innovative people in the world — until their government gets involved. The libertarian commentator Gurcharan Das argued more than a decade ago that “India grows at night, when the government sleeps.” An entirely avoidable fracas about how to regulate artificial intelligence in India is evidence that Das’s maxim still applies today.

India hosts a vibrant ecosystem of infotech companies, ranging from scrappy start-ups to continent-spanning behemoths. All of them were blindsided a few days ago by a government advisory decreeing that companies would need official permission to deploy any AI models on the “Indian” internet.