Bollywood versus Bangalore will define India’s AI policy: LKS Partner Badri Narayanan

India is approaching a decisive confrontation between its creator economy and its technology sector - a “Bollywood versus Bangalore” moment that will shape the country’s AI future - L Badri Narayanan, Executive Partner at Lakshmikumaran and Sridharan said at the India Law and Tech Summit organised by OakBridge Publishing. .Narayanan said that India’s intellectual property system, which was conceived during the industrial revolution, is struggling to regulate modern AI systems that rely on training datasets, APIs, prompts and synthetic data. These inputs do not fit naturally within traditional categories such as copyright or patents, he said.Pointing to the ongoing ANI versus OpenAI dispute before the Delhi High Court, he said that the case captures the fundamental question facing Indian policymakers. ANI has alleged that its copyrighted news content was used to train OpenAI’s models without authorisation. OpenAI has responded that all ANI data has since been deleted..According to Narayanan, this case signals a deeper choice for India.“Policymakers have the toughest decision to make. Whom are they going to protect - our filmmakers or our technologists? It is effectively between Bollywood and Bangalore.”.He described his firm’s hands-on experience with AI tools. After generating an automated due diligence report, he said that the system added a disclaimer: “unverified, proceed with your own caution.” “I put the same team to verify whether the DD report is correct or not,” he said..On multi-agent workflows, he said that connecting them produced “hallucination” and then “psychedelic aspects coming out of these documents.” He concluded with a candid assessment of AI’s limits. “After seeing all of this for last six months, I am convinced that my next 20 years are safe.”.In a separate address, Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas and Co (SAM) Executive Chairman Shardul Shroff presented a set of four pillars and objectives that he said should guide the legal profession through AI adoption.Shroff said that the four pillars are data, compute, trust and talent. He explained these as the foundation for a legal service economy that can scale responsibly..He said four core objectives flow from these pillars. These are organisational rethinking of AI and law, legal design and engineering, digital professional norms and trusting in-built systems.Shroff elaborated:"Data: Firms must ensure strong governance, privacy controls and clearly defined usage boundaries as AI systems learn from institutional knowledge.Compute: The legal profession must adapt to powerful computational resources while maintaining ethical standards and responsible deployment.Talent: Lawyers must be trained as AI orchestrators who are proficient in prompt design and risk management.Trust: Firms must reinforce the solemn trust owed to clients and embed that ethic into the software and architectures they use.".Describing SAM’s internal adoption of Harvey, he stated, “Since rolling out Harvey in April 2025, 75 percent of our lawyers use it.” He added that the gains were clearest where “pattern based workflows were automated, such as contract drafting and redrafting, knowledge management and dispute resolution support.”.Follow Bar and Bench channel on WhatsAppDownload the Bar and Bench Mobile app for instant access to the latest legal news.