will be open sourcing the models it is training as part of the IndiaAI Mission, Sarvam cofounder Vivek Raghavan, told ET.

This will be done under permissible licenses, he said. The company has received the highest subsidy allocated under the IndiaAI Mission so far at Rs 98.68 crore, out of a bill of Rs 246.71 crore for access to 4,096 Nvidia H100 GPUs for six months, as per the IndiaAI website.

As part of the first phase of approvals, Sarvam.ai was selected by the IndiaAI mission to initiate the development of an indigenous foundational AI model.

At an open source software meeting at IIIT-D on Saturday, Abhishek Singh, chief executive, IndiaAI Mission, in a virtual address, had said that the Government of India-sponsored large language models (LLMs) (including Sarvam's) have been decided to be made open source.

On Tuesday, Singh confirmed the same to ET.

This issue was first raised by Paras Chopra, founder and former chairman of software company Wingify. In a post on microblogging platform X on April 27, he had said, "So you're telling me that Deepseek with private funds can release an open source model, but govt awarding Rs 220 crores of public funds to Sarvam isn't asking for the same? This is tax payers money, so the full pipeline ought to be open source!"

To which another Sarvam.ai cofounder Pratyush Kumar had responded, "This is not a grant. A gov body will take equity in Sarvam for the compute we receive. And we are committed to building public interest use-cases and enabling the ecosystem in various ways such as hyper-optimising the inferencing costs in India."

India gave the cabinet approval for the Rs 10,000-crore IndiaAI Mission in March last year, with a target of procuring over 10,000 GPUs.

As part of the IndiaAI mission, the government is incentivising the development of LLMs built by startups like Sarvam, Gnani, Gan, and Soket AI Labs with investment capital and other support. The move is aimed at building up India’s AI prowess.

Sunil Gupta, chief executive of Yotta Data Services, on June 28 revealed that out of 506 proposals received by the IndiaAI Mission for building foundation AI models, a striking 43 are specifically dedicated to building LLMs, underscoring the nation's strategic emphasis on sovereign and culturally relevant AI.

He was speaking at a panel discussion at the AI for India Summit 2025, organised by AI4India in Bengaluru.