'Models are getting refined on our data': Amitabh Kant says AI will be sold to Global South at a very high cost

India AI Impact Summit 2026: American companies that are building the biggest artificial intelligence (AI) models are doing so on the data of the Global South. Yet they would sell the same AI models back to the citizens of the Global South, including India, at rather high costs, said former G20 sherpa and former NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant at the India AI Impact Summit 2026. He cautioned that it was important to build our own models based on our own data. 

“If you look at OpenAI, ChatGPT, we are providing more data than the US – 33 per cent more data than the US is doing. These large language models are getting better and better on the basis of data from the Global South. So, the models are getting refined with data for the Global South, they will create business models and sell you products at a very high cost tomorrow. So it is important when India or the Global South builds up its models, they are made better on their own data,” said Kant. 

Kant said that it is important that we learn from our own digital public infrastructure. “It has enabled India to leapfrog 50 years of progress in seven years. How did we do it? It was done because it was open source, it was open API and it was globally interoperable. So therefore, today we do fast payments, we do stock market transactions, we do insurance, we do credit to the last mile on the basis of this open source,” he said.

India created this digital public infrastructure layer and allowed the private sector to innovate and compete in the market space on top of that, he said. “Therefore, my view is that there has to be a digital public identity in AI, over which we allow the private sector to open and compete. But more important than that is that we use AI to transform the citizens of the Global South,” he said.

Kant added that the challenge is to see whether AI can reach the people below poverty line or other vast segments of population where it can be used to transform lives. He said it must be used to improve learning outcomes and improve nutrition standards, which are major challenges before the world.