Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the inaugural event of AI Impact Expo 2026 in New Delhi on Monday
| Photo Credit:
ANI
As AI becomes relevant in defence applications, experts have said it has the capacity to synthesise a very large volume of data, but on the flip side it does not have a rationality of a human being, and that is of prime concern when military decision-making is involved.
Speaking at the Sovereign AI for National Security: India’s path to digital Sovereignty session, Lt. General Harsh Chibber, Director General Information Systems, Indian Army said: “The current AI is based on inductive logic. It does not have that objective rationality of a human being and that is of prime concern when military decision-making is involved because military decisions are very costly, primarily because of the human cost.”
He said currently the defence systems have multi-sensor, multi data, multi source fusion, which is the only way to analyse it to reach a decision if they have an AI interface in between.
“So, in this kind of persistent surveillance, the key concern is sovereignty. I think if we have to trust a system in such a scenario, the risk is that we will fall into automation bias …there’s a tendency of the human mind to trust automated output more than than your instinct. So, that automation becomes very threatening in we are not sure of the system we are implementing,” he noted.
Therefore, a persistent surveillance guided by AI is a must, he said. Another point he raised was that of AI in cognitive warfare. AI can build narratives very efficiently at lightning speed, and in a narrative warfare where cognition will play a very important role, there requires a superior algorithm.
“So our sovereignty, our capability to produce a superior algorithm, which is not only a defensive against an enemy cognitive offensive, but also can create a narrative which we can support for our other actions in the military application of par. So, in this superior algorithm creation, I think we have an edge and show that military application will have many sovereign solutions to deal with it,” he highlighted.
The third area is autonomous systems, and this is a cause of great worry because people are talking about how much of autonomy should be given to military application. As far as autonomy is concerned, every military system becomes autonomous at a certain stage, he added.
Speaking on the same lines, Brijesh Singh IPS with the government of Maharashtra said be it defence, government or private sector, one should not go for any of these “AI rappers because you cannot give the brain of your sovereignty at some place because it doesn’t understand you. The way we own the digital public infrastructure in India, we will have to create a cognitive public infrastructure, however difficult it may be. That’s why the challenge feels visceral and existential; we simply have to do it, and probably it’s time that we do it. This is the architecture of independence. India has no dearth of experts or talent in India — the only challenge is compute. Geopolitically, this must be addressed because GPUs are being used to control geopolitics, and that is why must ensure sovereignty across all layers of the cake,” he added.
Published on February 16, 2026
