India and the US Must Urgently Forge AGI Cooperation
The race for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is speeding up every day between the US and China. Policymakers in the US are worrying that if China reaches AGI first, it won’t just tilt the balance of power; it could upend the very logic of deterrence that has kept great-power war at bay for seven decades. Analysts also warn that there exists a credible level of possibility in the idea that AGI could neutralise an adversary’s nuclear command-and-control, making a “splendid first strike” thinkable and proxy conflicts winnable at will.An outcome like this also creates a situation that would leave India dangerously exposed in Asia’s new technology order. As the world is witnessing that China’s rapid, low-cost breakthroughs in AI, like DeepSeek, were built for just a few million dollars while bypassing U.S. chip controls. It eventually signals the pace and direction of travel of AI development, which presents that with Beijing’s military-civil fusion, frontier AI translates directly into PLA capability.
China’s AGI pathway is structurally military-first
One has to understand clearly that Beijing’s military-civil fusion is not a slogan, it is a procurement pipeline. To demonstrate this, Georgetown’s CSET analyzed 2,857 PLA AI contract awards (2023–24), identifying 1,560 suppliers and a core of 338 repeat awardees. In this, nearly three-quarters were non-traditional civilian tech vendors, demonstrating how commercial AI is systematically militarized in China.
The point worth considering here is that pipeline already manifests on India’s periphery through autonomous systems and AI-enabled ISR, while frontier models like DeepSeek show that China can sustain progress despite export controls by leveraging open-source and cost-efficient training regimes that undercut U.S. spending by orders of magnitude. Additionally, in parallel, several experts also agree that if AGI enables cyber disablement of nuclear forces, the bedrock of deterrence could crack, shifting escalation dynamics across the Indo-Pacific to Beijing’s advantage.
India’s capability gap demands allied scale
By comparing the existing AI capabilities of India and China, there is no denying that India’s compute and research base cannot, on current trajectories, credibly race alone. The current scenario reflects a peculiar problem where the United States commands thousands of petaflops of frontier AI compute, versus India’s much smaller capacity, while China benefits from a deeply integrated civil-military innovation complex that accelerates fielding cycles. Though India’s sovereign AI mission is a vital start, without tier-one access to advanced accelerators and rapid scaling to frontier training runs, it is infeasible to compete with China one-on-one. Meanwhile, open frontier systems emerging from China compress the cost curve, tightening timelines for rapid response over frontier AI development. Thus, the strategic question is not whether India should develop AI of course, it must but whether it can attain AGI-relevant capability in time without U.S. partnership on chips, models, and safety science. Here, the existing evidence suggests it is probably not possible, and the existential risk is that China’s AGI translates into decisive advantages in sensing, targeting, cyber operations, and real-time operational planning across the LAC and Indian Ocean.
A U.S.-India AGI compact serves both security and governance
To mitigate these problems, a US-India AGI cooperation is the real need of the hour. A joint AGI compact should rest on three planks. First, hard capability: tier-one U.S. export treatment for India on advanced accelerators, with a target of hundreds of thousands of GPUs for shared research clusters and model training accessible to vetted Indian labs, narrowing the time-to-frontier gap. Second, integrated research and defense translation: co-funded institutes and fellowships to retain and attract talent, paired with joint red-teaming on AGI-resilient nuclear C2 and real-time attribution of AI-enabled attacks, turning abstract safety research into concrete strategic stability tools. Third, rule-setting: co-sponsorship of an “AI of Humanity” framework with compute thresholds, auditing, and shared oversight in order to prevent unconstrained AGI racing while preserving access for democratic coalitions; this builds on existing transnational efforts but fills today’s governance vacuum before de facto norms are written by first movers.
From fragmented efforts to a strategic pact
If both sides recognise the stakes here, the process of cooperation will be smooth and effective. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, there is a growing shift towards framing the U.S.-China contest explicitly around AGI, where self-improving systems could confer compounding advantage. without allied pooling, even the U.S. will face mounting diffusion risks as cheaper training pathways proliferate. Several analyses of DeepSeek’s open-source acceleration warn that agility and community-driven iteration can outpace closed, capital-heavy models. This gives the US and India another reason to build a coordinated, democratic ecosystem that marries U.S. foundational science with India’s scale and data richness. Furthermore, it is also interesting to witness that in defence circles, the conversation is moving “beyond a Manhattan Project” toward an Apollo-like, whole‑of‑society model: multi-institutional, open with guardrails, and designed for rapid translation, which is precisely the posture a U.S.-India pact could adopt.
Act before deterrence erodes
Both India and the US have to acknowledge that this is a very narrow window. If AGI arrives first in an authoritarian ecosystem like China, India will confront a neighbour with superhuman planning, perception, and disruption capabilities and a fading assurance that nuclear deterrence can cap escalation.
Taking all these concerns into consideration, a U.S.-India AGI compact, which comprises hardware access, joint institutes and defence translation, and co-led governance, offers a realistic path to both capability and constraint. The policy ask is simple but urgent: elevate AGI cooperation to the level of a strategic technology alliance, fast-track export status and shared compute, stand up joint red-teams on nuclear resilience, and table a co-authored governance proposal before norms harden by default. The clock is ticking fast in the Indo-Pacific region, and the line between code and coercion is thinning every day. The only way forward is that India and the United States should draw a brighter line together, before some dragon writes the rules in silicon.