‘India needs AI to fight AI as cyber threats grow

NEW DELHI: India’s digital transformation has pushed the country into a new era of cybersecurity risk, where traditional, manual defences may no longer be enough to counter increasingly sophisticated and automated cyberattacks, National Cyber Security Coordinator Navin Kumar Singh said on Tuesday.

He stressed the need for artificial intelligence-powered security systems to protect critical infrastructure and digital services. Speaking at the CyberComm 2026 event organised by Ficci, Singh said India’s expanding digital public infrastructure — spanning Aadhaar, UPI, ONDC and large-scale citizen databases — has made the country one of the world’s most connected digital economies, but also significantly widened the attack surface for cybercriminals and state-backed hackers.

Calling “AI to fight AI” the “pressing need of the hour”, Singh also urged stronger industry-govt collaboration and real-time cyber threat information sharing to improve India’s collective cyber resilience. “There is a real quantum jump in the capabilities of AI systems for both cyber offence and cyber defence,” Singh said, warning that open-source AI models with capabilities comparable to advanced systems, such as GPT-5.5, could become widely available within six-tonine months.

India’s internet subscriber base has grown more than three-fold in the last decade, while per capita internet data usage has surged nearly 400 times. Singh said India’s Digital Public Infrastructure model, which combines interoperable public platforms with private innovation, is now being studied globally
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