Free subscriptions feel like festival season arrived early, except this time, the gifts are premium AI plans worth thousands of rupees. Airtel is bundling Perplexity Pro for free, Jio is giving Google AI Pro for 18 months, and OpenAI is offering a year of ChatGPT Go at zero cost.
At first, it seems like these global tech giants are suddenly in a generous mood. But in reality, these offers reveal how India has become a crucial piece in the world’s AI race.
India: The perfect market for AI expansion India today has more internet users than almost any other country. Mobile data is among the cheapest in the world, smartphones are everywhere, from large metros to remote villages, and an entire generation aged between 18 and 35 practically lives online. This combination makes India one of the easiest and fastest markets for tech companies to penetrate. Telecom operators like Airtel and Jio play a huge role here. With hundreds of millions of subscribers, they can push a new service to an enormous audience instantly.
When these telecom giants partner with AI companies and add an expensive AI plan as a free add-on, it becomes effortless for companies like Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity to reach audiences at a scale that other countries simply cannot offer. This isn’t just about increasing subscriber numbers. For AI companies, India offers something far more valuable: data and diversity. Also read: ChatGPT Go subscription worth ₹4,788 now free for all Indians
India’s real value: Training data for AI models AI models don’t improve magically, they grow and become more accurate by learning from enormous amounts of data. Every question typed, every image uploaded, every interaction users have with an AI tool helps the system “learn.” This is where India becomes essential. The country has unmatched linguistic diversity, hundreds of dialects, and millions of people using the internet in completely different ways. For AI, this is a goldmine. The more varied the data, the better the model becomes at understanding global behaviour, accents, languages, and cultural nuances. To collect this data, AI companies rely on enormous datasets built from websites, public internet pages, social media content, and user interactions.
Tools called “web crawlers” scrape and collect information from across the web. Companies like Google already have their own crawlers, while others use public resources such as Common Crawl.
Along with this, companies also use data generated directly on their platforms. OpenAI fine-tunes its models using user conversations. Meta trains its systems using public Facebook and Instagram posts. Amazon uses some voice commands from Alexa. All of this helps them make AI tools that sound more natural and more accurate. But this is where the problem begins, because most companies don’t fully disclose where their training data comes from. The increasing legal battles around data Globally, several publishers, news organisations and platforms have raised concerns about AI companies using copyrighted material without permission. The New York Times sued Perplexity for allegedly copying and distributing its stories. The Chicago Tribune filed a similar case. Reddit accused Perplexity of scraping its site without authorisation. Cloudflare said the startup hid its crawling activity. Even entertainment giants like Disney and Universal sued Midjourney for allegedly recreating their iconic characters. These lawsuits reveal a deeper issue: AI models depend heavily on large amounts of copyrighted content, and many companies initially gathered such data without consent. In response, firms like OpenAI have now started signing licensing agreements with major global publishers like The Guardian, TIME, Reuters, Le Monde, and Axel Springer. These deals help them legally train AI models using verified, high-quality content. Also read: New York Times sues Perplexity for ‘illegal’ copying of content, another chapter in AI copyright battle
India also offers something unique Beyond consumers, India is a global hub for IT outsourcing, with millions of engineers and developers. Many AI companies see India not just as a market but also as a place to build datasets, run cloud farms, and develop content moderation operations. Small towns and tier-2 cities could soon become centres for training AI systems, reviewing data, and building new datasets. India’s linguistic and cultural variety is another big attraction. For an AI system struggling to understand global accents, speech patterns, or regional contexts, Indian data is incredibly valuable. Can Indian users protect their data? Right now, not entirely. India doesn’t have a law specifically designed for artificial intelligence. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP 2023) deals with personal data, but it hasn’t been fully implemented and does not cover AI accountability or the right to opt out of data training. In contrast, places like California and the European Union already have stronger privacy and AI regulations. But even where laws exist, technical challenges remain. Once data is used to train an AI model, it becomes part of the model’s “memory.” Removing it is not simple; it often requires retraining the entire model, which can cost millions of dollars. Also read: Sam Altman just dropped a truth bomb – India is now company’s ‘second-largest market’ with 3X growth
Free AI isn’t really free India is currently the most attractive market for AI companies worldwide, not because users pay high subscription fees, but because they generate massive amounts of valuable data. Free subscriptions are simply a gateway to bring millions into the ecosystem quickly. In reality, these companies are not giving away expensive plans out of kindness. They’re investing in long-term gains: better data, better models, higher valuations, and a powerful presence in the world’s fastest-growing digital market. The short truth is that the free AI tools help companies grow faster and learn faster.
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