Major global powers are racing to integrate AI into command, control, intelligence, and weapons systems.
The US War Department recently entered into agreements with eight AI companies—OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon Web Services, Oracle, SpaceX, and Reflection AI—to deploy frontier AI capabilities on classified military networks to become an AI-first fighting force. These AI systems will operate within highly classified environments to improve data synthesis, situational awareness, and battlefield decision-making.
The department also revealed that its internal AI platform, GenAI.mil, has already been used by more than 1.3 million personnel, generating tens of millions of prompts and deploying hundreds of thousands of AI agents within five months.
Elsewhere, China is using AI for “the integrated development of military intelligentisation,” creating a national strategy of military-civil fusion for AI-backed surveillance and geospatial intelligence. Meanwhile, AI is fundamentally transforming the Russia-Ukraine war into a testing ground for autonomous warfare.
Such developments show that AI is rapidly becoming central to intelligence gathering, autonomous surveillance, cyber warfare, battlefield decision-making, electronic warfare, and drone operations. But it also poses a larger question for the Indian military: is it ready for AI-led warfare?
Sarvam AI to the Rescue?
Sarvam AI and several Indian AI startups are in discussions with the Ministry of Defence to establish a ₹300 crore Centre of Excellence for defence AI, according to a report by the Economic Times.
The proposed initiative aims to build indigenous AI systems trained on Indian datasets, terrain, and operational requirements for applications such as surveillance, reconnaissance, and battlefield decision support as India expands the use of AI across its defence ecosystem.
Notably, Sarvam AI, earlier this year, launched a new vertical called Chanakya to develop AI systems for enterprises and strategic use cases. The initiative focuses on deploying AI in environments where systems operate without internet access and where reliability is critical.
General Upendra Dwivedi recently said in a podcast hosted by the Observer Research Foundation that the Indian Army is working with Sarvam AI. “We are now looking at agentic AI to be included. We already have predictive analysis and generative AI, but this is something we are looking at for the future. We already have the Battlefield Surveillance System, which has been inducted, and CIDSS (Command Information and Decision Support System), which has also been inducted,” he said.
AIM has reached out to Sarvam to confirm the collaboration, but has yet to receive a response.
Armed Forces Make Moves
Meanwhile, CoRover.ai, was recently selected by the Indian Army to establish a sovereign AI laboratory.
At the core of the lab is BharatGPT, CoRover’s indigenous language model, which supports multilingual, multimodal and multichannel interactions across text, voice, and video. The platform’s agentic AI framework will allow Army personnel to create intelligent agents capable of reasoning, contextual understanding, and task execution.
“AI could reshape warfare in ways far bigger than drones or cyber, because its impact cuts across intelligence gathering, threat interpretation, and decision-making simultaneously,” Ankush Sabharwal, CEO of Corover.ai, tells AIM.
“The real advantage will come less from firepower and more from speed, accuracy, and decision intelligence, and critically, it must work on-device without internet, since field conditions and data security demand it,” he adds.
The Indian Armed Forces are already testing what AI-powered warfare could look like in practice. During Operation Sindoor—which recently marked its first anniversary—the Indian Army integrated advanced AI into combat and decision-making processes.
Lieutenant General Rajiv Kumar Sahni, Director General of Electronics and Mechanical Engineers and then DG Information Systems, described in a media briefing last October that the operation was India’s first conflict where AI was used heavily to shorten the “kill chain” and sharpen targeting accuracy. He said the Army fed 26 years of historical data into AI models, enabling them to pinpoint enemy assets such as gun and missile units with about 94% accuracy, supporting “human-in-the-loop” precision strikes during the May 2025 conflict with Pakistan.
Sahni added that these capabilities are now being improved with a military-specific LLM, which is expected to go operational within the next six months.
“AI-based tools enhanced surveillance, intelligence, and precision targeting. Key systems include the Electronic Intelligence Collation and Analysis System (ECAS), TRINETRA (integrated with Project SANJAY), and predictive modelling and weather forecasting tools—all of which improved coordination and situational awareness,” he told The Print.
Meanwhile, the Indian Navy is leveraging AI for maritime domain awareness through the Information Fusion Centre. For cybersecurity, it is leveraging HawkSecure, an AI/ML-powered network detection and response plaform developed by Nivetti Systems.
Also, the Indian Air Force established a Centre of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence in 2022, combining high-end compute with big data storage capabilities and full-spectrum AI software suites.
Sabharwal says there’s now a powerful push toward strategic self-reliance. But the next big challenge is creating faster procurement pathways that allow defence tech startups to collaborate more efficiently with the military. “The government’s push through iDEX, DRDO partnerships, and the broader Atmanirbhar Bharat framework is a genuinely encouraging foundation,” he says.
As militaries worldwide race to integrate AI into warfare, India appears to be moving from experimentation toward building its own sovereign military AI ecosystem. Whether that translates into long-term strategic advantage will depend not just on models and infrastructure, but on how quickly the country can operationalise them at scale.
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