March 2026 saw renewed global and domestic debate on Artificial Intelligence in national security, triggered in part by reports that the U.S. military integrated AI tools (including systems built on large language models) into targeting operations during the West Asia conflict, striking over 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours. The episode raised serious ethical and governance questions globally.

India has been developing its own AI security ecosystem: the IndiaAI Mission (₹10,372 crore flagship programme) has onboarded over 38,000 GPUs so far against a target of 1,00,000, while BharatGen — a government-funded multilingual large language model supporting 22 Indian languages — is under development. India's cybersecurity spending is projected to reach $3.4 billion in 2026, an 11.7% increase over 2025, driven by AI-enabled threats.

AI is being deployed along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) for real-time surveillance through drone swarms, predictive threat analysis, and anomaly detection in cyber networks. The U.S.-India iCET (Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies) partnership supports joint AI and semiconductor research.

India's AI Governance Guidelines 2026 address autonomous weapons regulation. Critical challenges include: dependence on foreign technology stacks, unexplainable AI decision-making in lethal contexts, AI-driven disinformation, deepfakes, and restricted Nvidia chip export concerns. For Rajasthan, AI-driven surveillance applications have potential in border management along the Rajasthan-Pakistan border, while BharatGen's Rajasthani and Hindi language support has direct relevance for e-governance and digital service delivery in the state.