BharatGen Joins AI Alliance’s Project Tapestry to Build Sovereign AI

The AI Alliance has announced that India’s BharatGen will anchor the country’s initial role in Project Tapestry, a global consortium working to develop frontier AI through distributed model development while allowing participating nations and institutions to retain control over their data, models, and deployment.

The announcement comes as AI sovereignty emerged as a central topic at the G7 Summit in Evian and VivaTech in Paris, with governments increasingly examining how to build and deploy AI systems without relying entirely on a small number of technology providers.

BharatGen, backed by the IndiaAI Mission and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), joins the project as a founding contributor, bringing multilingual AI infrastructure designed for India’s linguistic diversity.

A letter of intent formalising the collaboration was signed on June 18 by IIT Bombay Director Shireesh Kedare in the presence of Deputy Directors Milind Atrey and Ravindra Gudi, along with Ganesh Ramakrishnan, founding director of BharatGen.

BharatGen will immediately begin co-leading workstreams on distributed model training as part of Project Tapestry. The initiative seeks to bring together data, compute resources, talent, and funding from multiple countries and organisations to develop frontier AI systems while preserving national ownership and control.

“India has long believed that science advances fastest when it is open and shared. Project Tapestry, which lets nations build frontier AI together while retaining sovereignty over their data and models, reflects the collaborative, self-reliant innovation India is advancing,” said Professor Ajay Sood, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India.

The project is built around a distributed development architecture in which a base model is developed centrally and then adapted by participating organisations using local data. Participants can contribute improvements back to the shared model while retaining ownership of their data and any derivative models they create.

“As India builds frontier AI rooted in its own languages and knowledge, IIT Bombay and BharatGen, supported by the India AI mission, are proud to support and participate as a founding contributor in Project Tapestry, an open, global consortium for nations to advance frontier AI together,” said Shireesh Kedare, Director of IIT Bombay and Chairman of BharatGen.

Project Tapestry was launched last month during a technical workshop in Paris attended by around 30 AI leaders from countries including the United States, France, India, Vietnam, Japan, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. Participants included organisations such as Pleias, PRAIRE, AMI Labs, Software Heritage, and Current AI.

According to the AI Alliance, the initiative is designed to enable countries and institutions to collaborate on AI development without transferring sensitive datasets to a centralised provider.

“AI is becoming essential infrastructure. No single company or country should determine who can build on it, adapt it, or benefit from it. Project Tapestry is a test of whether frontier AI can be built as open infrastructure: collaborative, capable, and sovereign by design,” said Dr Yann LeCun, Chief Science Advisor of the AI Alliance and Executive Chairman of AMI Labs.

Vietnam has also emerged as an early participant in the project. The National Innovation Center and FPT Corporation are working with Project Tapestry to develop AI systems aligned with Vietnamese language, culture, and industry requirements while maintaining local ownership and governance.

“With the National Innovation Center and FPT Corporation engaged, Project Tapestry gives Vietnam a path to help build frontier AI that reflects its language, culture, industries, and institutions while retaining control over its own data, models, and deployment,” said Dr Christopher Nguyen, Chief Architect of Project Tapestry and CEO of Aitomatic.

The AI Alliance said future AI capabilities will increasingly depend on access to scientific, technical, industrial, and national datasets that are often unavailable on the open web. Project Tapestry aims to create a framework for using such data in AI development without requiring organisations to surrender control over it.

“Project Tapestry aims to build the most capable frontier AI possible in a way that ensures the value and control of that AI is retained by those developing and deploying it—whether they are in industry, government, a non-profit or an individual,” said Dr Anthony Annunziata, Chairman of the AI Alliance and Director of AI Open Innovation at IBM.