India proposes new rules requiring labeling of AI-generated content

India’s government has tabled a draft law change that would compel artificial intelligence (AI) and social media platforms to label AI-generated content clearly. MeitY wants to amend the Information Technology Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules of 2021 to include the new definitions.

According to the drafted rules announced Wednesday by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), AI and social media platforms OpenAI, Meta, X, and Google will be required to label AI-generated visuals, audio, and videos prominently.

MeitY’s rules will see companies slap labels occupying at least 10% of the surface area of an image, or covering the first 10% of an audio clip’s duration, if they are AI-generated.

The ministry said the policy will help regulators with metadata traceability and transparency for all public-facing AI-generated media. It has invited comments from industry stakeholders and the public by November 6, before finalizing its approval and signing the bill into law.

Tech and media companies required to label AI content in India

According to drafts of the proposed framework, social media users will also have to declare if any content they upload has been generated or altered using AI tools.

The amendments define AI-generated information as content “artificially or algorithmically created, generated, modified or altered using a computer resource, in a manner that such information reasonably appears to be authentic or true.”

Dhruv Garg, founding partner at the Indian Governance and Policy Project, said the rules are “one of the first explicit attempts globally to prescribe a quantifiable visibility standard.”

If enacted, Garg surmised, it would require AI companies and content platforms to build automated labeling tools for detecting and marking synthetic content at the point of creation before it is accessed by the public.

Bollywood lawsuits part of deepfake regulation calls

India’s draft proposal comes on the backdrop of several lawsuits regarding deepfakes in Indian courts. Earlier this month, Bollywood actors Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan petitioned a New Delhi court to block and remove AI-generated videos that allegedly “infringed on their likeness and intellectual property.”

The couple, seeking almost half a million in damages, also claimed YouTube’s AI trainers unlawfully used public content to generate AI media featuring their images.

Indian policymakers cited the cases as evidence that unregulated AI technologies could harm reputations, distort elections, and erode public trust in digital information ecosystems.

The IT ministry said its new draft seeks to “build transparency safeguards into AI systems before risks are beyond control.”

India’s regulatory proposals follow similar laws in the European Union bloc, which finalized its AI Act requiring transparency labels for synthetic media. China also introduced mandatory watermarking standards for AI-generated visuals and text last year.

AI investment surge in India

The labeling proposal comes at a time when India is experiencing a surge in artificial intelligence investment. According to MeitY, the country surpassed $20 billion in cumulative and new AI investment commitments in 2025.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said earlier this year that India is his company’s second-largest market by number of users. Estimates from Spherical Insights also show private sector investments hit $11.1 billion, while public funding through government-led programs has reached $12.3 billion as of August.

A major share of this growth is buoyed by Google’s $15 billion AI hub under construction in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. Announced during the Bharat AI Shakti event in October, the facility will be Google’s largest AI complex outside the United States, Cryptopolitan reported.

Google mentioned that the data center will host gigawatt-scale compute power, new renewable energy infrastructure, a subsea data gateway, and domestic fiber connectivity.

The government’s IndiaAI Mission, implemented by MeitY and the IndiaAI Innovation Center, has already allocated more than 38,000 GPUs for nationwide access at subsidized rates.

IndiaAI had approved 30 application development projects by mid-2025, all on responsible AI and solving problems within the jurisdiction, like disaster response, urban planning, and public health.