What DPDP Act (India) means in practice
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 is India's first comprehensive data-protection law. It establishes consent as the default lawful basis for processing personal data of Indian data principals, treats health and financial data as a special category requiring explicit consent and stricter handling, mandates breach notification, and provides for a Data Protection Board with enforcement teeth. For AI systems the practical implications mirror GDPR: model training requires lawful basis, cross-border processing requires consent or an exception, and the sovereign-deployment pattern (data and model under the regulated entity's exclusive control) is the cleanest path to compliance for regulated workloads.
Related terms
GDPR →
The EU's General Data Protection Regulation — sets the rules for processing personal data of EU residents, with significant implications for AI systems that touch that data.
RBI Master Direction on IT Governance →
The Reserve Bank of India's master directive on IT governance for regulated entities — specifies that AI/ML model lifecycle artefacts must be hosted under the regulated entity's exclusive control.
Sovereign AI →
An architecture where customer data never leaves the network perimeter, model weights run on customer-controlled hardware, inference logs stay in the customer's SIEM, and the entire stack can operate air-gapped.
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The Sovereign AI Playbook.
Enterprise generative AI that runs on your servers.
- 01Definition. The four non-negotiable properties of a sovereign deployment — and the three patterns that look sovereign but aren't.
- 02Why now. Three forces that converged in 2026: regulator pressure, the open-weights capability gap closing, and unit economics flipping.
- 03Reference architecture. The five-layer stack we deploy: applications → agent runtime → sovereign LLM → RAG + KB → data stores. With model and tooling choices for each.
- 04The regulators. SAMA · RBI · UK ICO · EU AI Act · DPDP · HIPAA — what each requires and how it maps to architecture.
All 62 terms, in plain language
Sovereign AI, RAG, agentic AI, IDP, MLOps and the regulations that shape enterprise AI.