Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan, and Secretary, Department of Defence R&D and Chairman, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Dr Samir V Kamat on Thursday launched Evaluating Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (ETAI) Framework and Guidelines for the Armed Forces. This is part of the plan to integrate trustworthy AI into critical defence operations.

The ETAI Framework focuses on five broad principles: Reliability & robustness, safety & security, transparency, fairness and privacy. It also defines a comprehensive set of criteria for evaluating trustworthy AI.

“Complementing the framework, the ETAI guidelines provide specific measures to be implemented in the AI pipeline to meet these criteria. The framework and guidelines offer developers and evaluators, a structured approach to build and assess Trustworthy AI,” the defence ministry said in a statement.

Observing that the recent and ongoing global conflicts have shown how AI is revolutionising modern warfare, CDS Chauhan underscored the urgent need to incorporate AI into military operations. He said it is important to ensure these systems not only work as planned but are also resilient to attacks from enemies.

The DRDO chairman pointed out that reliability and robustness are no longer optional, but are essential to prevent mission failures and unintended consequences. He said AI systems need to be reliable, robust, transparent and safe for the success of future operations.

ETAI Framework is a risk-based assessment framework developed specifically for the defence sector, said Director General of Micro Electronic Devices, Computational Systems & Cyber Systems at DRDO, Suma Varughese, and added that the principles, criteria and measures of the framework is applicable to other sectors as well.

(With Inputs From Agencies)