India, Sept. 22 -- Imagine a bank commissioning the thickest vault door money can buy and then leaving the loading bay unlocked because no one thought it was important enough. That's roughly where sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) strategy stands today. Governments across the world are funding their own models, hosting them on their own soil, and keeping the keys out of foreign hands. The instinct is sound, but the vault is only as good as every other door in the building, and AI systems come with far more doors than most organizations realize.

India has put real money into sovereign AI. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) launched the India AI Mission in 2024 with an outlay of $1 billion. In 2026, the gov...