The Road to the India AI Impact Summit Report
“Community and Policy Engagement August 2025”
Released on 4 August 2025
Shared across India during a series of OpenUK and OpenHQ events in August 2025, from Hyderabad to Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi, this report was a provocation for conversation on the road to the India AI Impact Summit, Delhi 2026. It brings the latest data on India’s open source and AI openness landscape, its global positioning and its collaboration with the UK, alongside recommendations for making the Summit’s shift from “Action” to “Impact” real through open source and public good AI. It laid the groundwork for the fuller AI Openness report published in November 2025 and the Openness Fringe held in Delhi during the Summit.
Report Includes:
Data
- India’s global positioning in open source: 852 repositories with 1k+ GitHub stars and open source licences (up 68% over three years), 18m+ GitHub accounts, second largest globally and projected by GitHub to be number one by 2028
- Global and India AI repository data, Hugging Face trends, and Scarf data on downloads of AI that is open
- India’s open source collaboration partners, and the top 20 public AI repositories based in India
Policy and Landscape
- India’s in-country reporting on open source, including the National Law School of India University’s July 2025 report “The Rise of FOSS in India”
- The global AI openness landscape: the “open source AI” definition debate, open washing, and the data conundrum
- Prime Minister Modi’s Paris AI Action Summit framing, AI that is “Inclusive, Transparent and Trustworthy” and the Delhi Summit’s shift from Action to Impact
Recommendations
- Recommendations for the India Summit to have Impact: build on the Action at Paris, focus on Public Good AI, and engage the local and globally collaborative open communities
Executive Summary
Published as OpenUK and OpenHQ began their engagement across India six months ahead of the AI Impact Summit, this report shows an Indian open source ecosystem growing faster than anywhere else in the world, and a deep, underexploited partnership with the UK.
India sixth globally in AI repositories but fastest growing in 2025
- AI repositories from India with 1k+ stars and open source licences grew 38% in 2025 to 31 May, the largest growth margin across the top six countries in AI, placing India number one in growth globally
- India reached 55 such AI repositories; the US and China lead at 1,068 and 601, with the UK third at 135, a significant level per capita
- India’s open source repositories overall have grown 68% over the last three years, to 852
India has deep AI skills
- With 18m+ GitHub accounts India is second largest globally and projected by GitHub to be number one by 2028
- India is the world’s second largest contributor to AI repositories despite sixth place in repository ownership, a large skilled workforce and a clear growth opportunity for India-based projects
- Downloads of AI that is open grew 4x year on year, the highest level in the world, with 39,600 Indian companies downloading AI that’s open in the past year
India and the UK have a high level of collaboration
- India’s primary open source collaboration partner is the US; its second is the UK, despite the UK’s diminutive size
- The UK holds the highest per-capita GitHub account level globally (6.1%), passing 4 million accounts for the first time
Recommendations for a Summit with Impact
- Learn from open source software implementation to achieve access to AI for all; digital public infrastructure of the future will be AI-driven and requires open source for public good AI
- Engage India’s large open source community and the global community in the Summit, past summits have failed to engage this community
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