The U.S.–India AI Moment: A Partnership Ready to Deliver
Last week, SCSP and the Observer Research Foundation America (ORF America) held a session of our U.S.-India AI & Technology Cooperation Dialogue in New Delhi. Despite occasional frictions in the relationship, both American and Indian participants from government and industry pointed to AI and emerging technologies as a critical area of partnership for both countries. With India slated to host the AI Impact Summit in February 2026, we used this Dialogue to craft key recommendations to shape bilateral priorities in AI cooperation for both governments ahead of the summit.
In June, as part of the AI+ Expo in Washington, DC, SCSP and ORF America hosted the launch of the U.S.-India AI & Technology Cooperation Dialogue. Both the United States and India sit at the center of the emerging technology competition. India is emerging as one of the largest global testbeds for scaled AI deployment, while America remains – for now – the unrivalled leader in advanced compute, foundational models, and frontier research. As geopolitical risk rises – from Beijing’s coercive economic and technology practices to weaponized supply chains – the ability of Washington and New Delhi to co-develop and co-deploy joint platforms will increasingly determine the balance of economic and strategic power across the Indo-Pacific.
The View from New Delhi
However, the first message we heard on arrival was that a degree of trust had been broken, despite the fanfare of Prime Minister Modi’s and President Trump’s incredibly positive initial meeting in February 2025. While important elements of defense cooperation in the bilateral relationship remained, tensions over trade and tariffs certainly raised questions in New Delhi about the reliability of Washington as a key partner.
India’s strategic calculus is shaped by a long memory. Its geopolitical balancing act reflects realities on the ground, where it faces real threats of terrorism (the horrendous attack at the Red Fort occurred during our visit), a border dispute with China, persistent tensions with Pakistan, and a new administration in Washington that has made seemingly contradictory moves in the bilateral relationship over a short period of time. While India seeks pragmatic engagement with China to mitigate the risk of direct conflict on their shared border, growing Chinese economic and technological strength and coercion have become clear rationales for India to partner with American industry to ensure its security and economic resilience. India’s scale, talent, and dynamic environment coupled with American advantages in capital, compute infrastructure, and innovation ecosystem offer a strong response to China’s state-led efforts to dominate the next generation of critical technologies. Even if India may not necessarily join a military response against Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, India can still help America strategically balance against China.
A Moment Ripe for Collaboration
Last week’s gathering in Delhi came at a pivotal moment: both countries now view AI and other emerging technologies as the cornerstone of economic competitiveness, national security, and geopolitical alignment in an increasingly contested world order. While trade tensions have hit the relationship, the recent optimistic signals by both American and Indian leaders toward an imminent trade resolution helped shift the focus of our discussions from frameworks to execution. And India’s upcoming AI Impact Summit, for which our dialogue was an official pre-summit event, offered a clear waypoint by which to provide ideas for deepening U.S.-India collaboration in these areas. The enthusiasm during the dialogue stemmed from a shared recognition of the same truth: the time for talking about collaboration has passed, we now need to focus on building and deploying AI together.
The TRUST & COMPACT initiatives, launched by President Trump and Prime Minister Modi in February 2025, alongside the U.S. AI Action Plan and India’s AI Mission, underscored the strengthening of the bilateral technology relationship. These mandates reflect a shared commitment to AI technological leadership and innovation. Despite a recent rift in U.S.-India trade relations, the respective private sectors in the United States and India are bullish on the mutual benefits of a bilateral relationship.
Across two-and-a-half days of our dialogue in New Delhi, it was clear that a sustainable and trusted bilateral relationship requires pragmatism, long-term engagement, and realized progress. American officials and industry representatives heard from Indian partners on India’s focus on a light touch regulatory environment to unleash innovation. As one participant put it, the partnership’s defining feature is trust built through delivering economic and social prosperity to our citizens.
For our dialogue, we focused on four workstreams to unlock greater U.S.-India collaboration in AI and technology:
1) Applications - developing and deploying AI use cases in both civilian and military domains that will be mutually beneficial to both countries;
2) Infrastructure - securing the chips, cloud, compute, and energy that power AI technologies;
3) Talent - creating education to employment pipelines that will be essential for innovation; and
4) Policy - ensuring our AI governance approaches enable successful innovation.
AI Applications for Economic and Societal Prosperity
The next phase of the AI race will be won by countries that translate research and innovation into deployment of use cases. This requires using AI to address real world problems that citizens in both nations face. In fact, India has prioritized apps as a key focus for its AI Impact Summit to showcase the range of impact that AI can unleash for the world.
India offers a market of unparalleled size and dynamism, allowing American tech companies to refine AI tools in real-world, high-variance environments. For both America and India, partnering on AI applications can accelerate access to, development, and deployment of mature, cutting edge technologies that can address the range of opportunities and challenges in areas such as AI for health care, education, cybersecurity, defense, predictive agriculture, disaster response, industrial automation, and much more. Jointly deployed AI can also meaningfully strengthen both countries’ economic and strategic positioning in third countries - India can offer a gateway to Global South partners with competitive access vis-a-vis Chinese apps and tech stack.
Stressing that joint deployment of AI applications in specific verticals is the surest path to progress, participants pushed for harmonizing various U.S.-India AI forums to coordinate investments, loosen export controls, and comply with data sharing frameworks.
AI Infrastructure: The Building Blocks
India should complement America’s AI infrastructure stack instead of replicating it. India’s demand for data centers, energy resilience, and trusted compute is growing faster than domestic capacity. This has created opportunities for foreign partners, particularly American companies, to capitalize on the present cost advantages/discounts of building compute infrastructure in India before competitors fill the space - we heard that India has attracted tech-related foreign direct investment of $85 billion, the bulk of which are from American tech companies and hyperscalers.
Joint infrastructure buildouts that span compute clusters, subsea cables, cloud architecture, and energy systems create a mutually reinforcing advantage: India gains the backbone needed for its national AI deployment, and the United States gains a large, strategically located partner capable of supporting redundant, secure infrastructure routes in the Indo-Pacific.
The Talent Multiplier
India’s great advantage remains its enormous pool of young engineers, data scientists, and entrepreneurs with the ambition to build solutions for global markets. However, with the AI revolution underway, both nations face a widening skills gap in AI, semiconductor engineering, and cybersecurity. Both nations need to look beyond their elite institutions and tap into broader university systems to provide practical technical training, along with clear pathways to AI and technology careers. Alignment on certifications and standards on skills and training can create critical baselines for government, academia, and industry to identify key skillsets needed to strengthen AI and tech cooperation. Such alignment can also translate into clearer guidelines and expectations for student and entrepreneur visas, to allow both nations to reinforce their complementary interests in two-way talent flows. Clearer education-to-employment pathways will be essential to converting India’s scale and America’s research depth into a shared competitive advantage. Several Indian leaders encouraged U.S. companies to embed training cohorts within ongoing infrastructure and application rollouts, effectively turning deployments into workforce accelerators.
Light-Touch, High-Trust AI Governance
A striking point of agreement between both nations was on AI governance and a shared desire to enable innovation, rather than overly prescriptive frameworks that risk suffocating fast-moving innovation ecosystems. While the United States is exploring deregulation across several technology domains, India has articulated a “light regulation” approach focused on enabling and not constraining startups. Indeed, Indian officials described regulation as a “guardrail, not a gate,” emphasizing India’s focus on deployment over doctrine in key sectors. The Dialogue included tech demonstrations from Indian startups including AI applications for safer driving, improving agricultural management, and increasing manufacturing efficiency.
Both countries highlighted risks of cyber incidents, weak data-quality controls, and unclear cross-border standards impeding AI deployment at scale. There is strong consensus for joint cyber-incident reporting protocols, sector-specific data-sharing pilots, and a joint IP compact, provided the mechanisms protect commercial interests and avoid one-sided obligations. Rather than exporting rigid AI rulebooks, the United States and India can set the tone for a trusted and flexible framework.
The Road Ahead
Acknowledgement of challenges does not diminish ambition and commitment. Indeed, it was precisely the candor of these conversations that made Delhi’s meetings productive. No one pretended that alignment would be automatic. Instead, participants leaned into the complexity, guided by the conviction that strategic trust and shared ambition will carry this relationship forward.
If there was a unifying message across the week, it was that the U.S.-India partnership has matured beyond grand pronouncements to problem-solving and co-building. India’s confidence in its own trajectory, coupled with America’s willingness to cultivate the relationship, has created a rare and durable alignment of interest and intent. With China’s technological rise as a backdrop, and with both countries embracing an independent, light-touch regulatory ethos, the moment for cooperation is now.
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