UPSC Prelims Practice Questions — Reimagining sovereign AI for India’s strategic future

Q1. Under the IndiaAI Mission, which one of the following pillars is the one exclusively tasked with building the subsidised common GPU compute capacity offered to startups and academia at about Rs.65 per GPU-hour?

  • A. IndiaAI Compute Capacity
  • B. IndiaAI Innovation Centre
  • C. IndiaAI Datasets Platform
  • D. Safe & Trusted AI

Q2. The 'seven Sutras' that anchor India's principle-based approach to safe and trusted AI were laid down in which one of the following documents?

  • A. India AI Governance Guidelines, released in November 2025
  • B. National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, 2018
  • C. Principles for Responsible AI, 2021
  • D. Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023

Q3. Sovereign AI, as conceptualised in India's strategic discourse, is a nation's capacity to develop, host, govern and operationalise AI systems under its own control across how many core components — namely compute, models/algorithms, data, and governance frameworks?

  • A. Two
  • B. Three
  • C. Four
  • D. Five

Q4. The IndiaAI Mission — including the provisioning of common compute for training foundation and frontier models — is executed through which one of the following as its implementation agency?

  • A. IndiaAI, an Independent Business Division under the Digital India Corporation, MeitY
  • B. NITI Aayog
  • C. Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC)
  • D. National Informatics Centre (NIC)

Q5. With reference to 'frontier AI models', which one of the following best describes the order of training compute conventionally used to demarcate the most advanced (frontier) class of models?

  • A. Around ten septillion (10^25) or more floating-point operations
  • B. Around ten billion (10^10) floating-point operations
  • C. Around ten trillion (10^13) floating-point operations
  • D. Around ten quintillion (10^19) floating-point operations

Q6. In July 2026, the U.S. government action that most directly restricted access to cutting-edge AI capability for foreign nationals involved which one of the following?

  • A. Directing Anthropic to suspend access to its most advanced Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals on national-security grounds
  • B. Imposing a blanket ban on all cloud-computing exports to India
  • C. Revoking the manufacturing tax credits granted under the CHIPS and Science Act
  • D. Withdrawing from the New Delhi Declaration on AI Impact

Q7. In the context of global AI-sovereignty strategies, Argentina's offer of a 'regulatory safe harbour' to attract AI investment refers most precisely to which one of the following?

  • A. A framework that shields AI developers from certain regulatory liabilities or restrictions to encourage them to locate and invest there
  • B. A state-owned data centre reserved only for domestic AI firms
  • C. An exemption on import tariffs applied solely to AI chips
  • D. A prohibition on all foreign AI models in order to protect local firms

Q8. Which of the following is/are correctly identified as institutional measures or safeguards India has adopted to reduce strategic dependence on foreign AI systems?

  1. Creation of the Defence AI Council (DAIC) to promote adoption of AI in defence systems
  2. Creation of the Defence AI Project Agency (DAIPA)
  3. A stance that AI used in strategic sectors should be able to operate offline and remain transparent and auditable
  4. A mandate routing all Indian government data through foreign-hosted frontier models
  • A. 1 and 2 only
  • B. 2 and 4
  • C. 1, 2 and 3
  • D. 1, 3 and 4
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