Why tech giants are offering premium AI tools to Indians for free (www.bbc.com)

Big tech is quietly subsidizing AI adoption in India: OpenAI is offering millions of Indians a year of free access to its new low-cost ChatGPT “Go” chatbot, while Google and Perplexity have struck deals with Reliance Jio and Airtel to bundle discounted or free AI tools with mobile data packs. These are not freebies but strategic customer‑acquisition plays — India’s ~900 million internet users, inexpensive data and a very young, mobile-first population offer enormous scale for usage, experimentation and lock‑in. Technically and commercially, the implications are profound. Massive, diverse user interactions provide first‑party signals that can improve generative models, fine‑tune local language capabilities and surface new use cases; telco bundling accelerates usage and data capture. At the same time this raises data‑governance and algorithmic‑accountability issues: India lacks an enacted AI‑specific law (the DPDP 2023 is not yet in force and doesn’t fully address AI), so transparency, consent and privacy protections remain nascent. In contrast, regions like the EU and South Korea impose tougher compliance barriers that would complicate such rollouts. For now, companies can cheaply onboard users at scale in India — a potential long‑term win if regulators, user awareness and safeguards evolve to manage the privacy and safety risks.