Sovereign AI and Indic Languages

Ritwik Banerjee
Lav R. Varshney | Professor and Director, AI Innovation Institute, Stony Brook University
[Maneesh Kumar Singh] | VP of Machine Learning, BharatGen
[Kaushik Bhatta] | Partner, AI Alliance

We study what it means for a nation, community, or institution to have meaningful agency over the AI systems that shape its knowledge and decisions. Rather than treating sovereignty as insular, self-built infrastructure, our work frames it as epistemic agency and sovereignty of intelligent action: the capacity to decide what to share, federate, localize, or exclude, and to keep exercising that judgment as models and dependencies evolve [Singh et al. 2026]. This line of research connects to our broader work on multilingual and Indic-language NLP [Banerjee and Varshney 2026], information integrity, and federated approaches to building AI across borders.

Publications

Singh, M.K., Banerjee, R., Varshney, L.R., and Bhatta, K. 2026. Sovereignty Through Interdependence: Epistemic Agency, Intelligent Action, and Federated AI. .     

Banerjee, R. and Varshney, L.R. 2026. A Pāṇinian Foundation for Indic Language Processing. arXiv Preprint.     

This page is hosted and maintained by Dr. Ritwik Banerjee.