UPSC Prelims Practice Questions — AI and the national security calculus

Q1. 'Project Akashteer', the indigenous automated Air Defence Control and Reporting System extensively employed during Operation SINDOOR (2025), is being supplied to the Indian Army by which one of the following Defence Public Sector Undertakings?

  • A. Bharat Dynamics Limited (BDL)
  • B. Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL)
  • C. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL)
  • D. BEML Limited

Q2. In the context of contemporary debates on AI and national security, the term 'model distillation' most precisely refers to which one of the following?

  • A. Reducing the storage footprint of an AI model by converting its weights from higher to lower numerical precision
  • B. Training a smaller or weaker AI model on the outputs of a stronger frontier AI model so as to transfer the latter's knowledge without direct access to its training data
  • C. Fine-tuning a general-purpose foundation model on a domain-specific corpus to specialise it for a narrow task
  • D. Removing redundant neurons and connections from a neural network to shrink its size while preserving accuracy

Q3. At the first-ever 'Artificial Intelligence in Defence' (AIDef) symposium organised by the Department of Defence Production in 2022, exactly how many newly-developed AI products/technologies were formally launched by the Raksha Mantri?

  • A. 50
  • B. 75
  • C. 100
  • D. 125

Q4. With reference to the Evaluating Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (ETAI) Framework and Guidelines for the Armed Forces unveiled in 2024, consider the following. Which of the above are correctly identified as core principles laid down by the framework?

  1. Reliability and Robustness
  2. Transparency
  3. Cost-effectiveness
  4. Privacy
  • A. 1 and 2 only
  • B. 2, 3 and 4 only
  • C. 1, 2 and 4 only
  • D. 1, 3 and 4 only