India’s BharatGen commits to anchor India’s role in Project Tapestry as part of a growing coalition of organizations to develop more capable frontier AI that enhances sovereignty and opportunity for people, nations and industry.
PARIS, June 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — In a week when AI sovereignty dominated discussions from the G7 Summit in Évian to VivaTech in Paris, the AI Alliance announced that India’s BharatGen will anchor India’s initial role in Project Tapestry, a global open consortium to build frontier-capability AI through distributed model development while allowing participating nations and institutions to retain control over their own data, models, and deployment.
“AI is becoming essential infrastructure. No single company or country should determine who can build on it, adapt it, or benefit from it. Project Tapestry is a test of whether frontier AI can be built as open infrastructure: collaborative, capable, and sovereign by design.”
— Dr. Yann LeCun, Chief Science Advisor, AI Alliance and Executive Chairman, AMI Labs
Project Tapestry aims to bring together more data, talent, and resources than any one organization can do on their own, to create more capable, accessible and valuable AI that is the basis for India, led by full stack sovereign AI company BharatGen, has made a strong commitment to anchor Project Tapestry and will immediately begin co-leading workstreams in distributed model training in support of Tapestry’s goals.
The commitment connects India’s self-reliant AI ambitions with Tapestry’s collaborative model for building frontier AI while preserving national control over data, models, and deployment.
“India has long believed that science advances fastest when it is open and shared. Project Tapestry, which lets nations build frontier AI together while retaining sovereignty over their data and models, reflects the collaborative, self-reliant innovation India is advancing.”
— Professor Ajay Sood, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India
“As India builds frontier AI rooted in its own languages and knowledge, IIT Bombay and BharatGen supported by the India AI mission are proud to support and participate as a founding contributor in Project Tapestry, an open, global consortium for nations to advance frontier AI together.”
— Shireesh Kedare | Director, IIT Bombay and Chairman, BharatGen
French President Emmanuel Macron, who also holds the rotating G7 presidency this year, has made AI capability and global technology competition central themes of the week. Project Tapestry responds to that broader moment by bringing together countries, industries, research institutions, and communities to pool data, compute, talent, and funding — while each participant retains control over its own data, unique derivative models, and AI deployment.
Project Tapestry was formally launched a month ago at a kick-off technical workshop in Paris with 30 AI leaders from the US, France, India, Vietnam, Japan, Switzerland, UAE, and beyond. It included significant participation from France-based organizations including Pleias, PRAIRE, AMI Labs, Software Heritage, and Current AI, underscoring Macron’s ambition.
Vietnam: Enhancing Cultural Alignment and Capability
Vietnam has become one of Project Tapestry’s clearest national and cultural use cases: a country seeking to contribute data and expertise to a global consortium while building frontier AI that is socio-culturally and industrially aligned with Vietnam — and owned and governed by Vietnam institutions.
“With the National Innovation Center and FPT Corporation engaged, Project Tapestry gives Vietnam a path to help build frontier AI that reflects its language, culture, industries, and institutions while retaining control over its own data, models, and deployment.”
— Dr. Christopher Nguyen, Chief Architect of Project Tapestry and CEO of Aitomatic
Aligning an AI model to a culture requires much more than language translation – the unique preferences, customs, and practices must govern model output. In collaboration with Vietnam-based partners, Project Tapestry has already made progress in demonstrating alignment of models to Vietnamese culture.
The Path Ahead for Project Tapestry
The Paris workshop produced both an initial architecture for consortium-based frontier model development, as well as a clear path to grow and operate the consortium supported by the AI Alliance’s non-profit structure. The architecture centers on a base model developed centrally that participating nodes can receive, adapt, and continue to train with local data.
Participants share back improvements to the base while retaining ownership of their data and unique models and capabilities they develop for their own purposes. The guiding principle is: sovereignty cannot depend on trust alone. It must be protected by architecture.
“Project Tapestry aims to build the most capable frontier AI possible in a way that ensures the value and control of that AI is retained by those developing and deploying it – whether they are in industry, government, a non-profit or an individual. The knowledge and intelligence of humanity that is used to build AI does not live in any one organization. The most capable and trusted AI can’t either.”
— Dr. Anthony Annunziata, Chairman, AI Alliance and Director of AI Open Innovation, IBM
Tapestry’s consortium data advantage is not simply more data. The next frontier of AI capability will depend on data that is more diverse and has deeper knowledge from a broader set of domains across business, science and culture. These data are often absent from the open web: they are in national, scientific and technical databases, or embedded in industry and institutions. They cannot — and should not — be handed to a centralized provider.
How to Get Involved
Project Tapestry is seeking researchers, model developers, data and compute providers, and industry partners. Early contributors will help shape the project’s architecture, governance, and roadmap. Learn more here:
Website: https://thealliance.ai/projects/tapestry GitHub: https://github.com/The-AI-Alliance/tapestry Data: https://thealliance.ai/projects/tapestry/training-data-proposals
About the AI Alliance
The AI Alliance is a global nonprofit research and technology organization dedicated to advancing open, safe, and responsible AI through innovation, collaboration, and advocacy. Operating through both a 501(c)(3) public-benefit organization and a 501(c)(6) innovation association, the Alliance brings together more than 200 collaborating organizations across 29 countries spanning industry, academia, startups, research, and government. The Alliance supports open projects and initiatives across AI data, models, agents, safety, and governance.
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