Questions, answered.

AI Commons Foundation of India (AICFI) is a not-for-profit being formed to build out India’s AI stack with the companies and institutions building it. It writes open standards, evaluates and certifies AI systems, runs a research lab, and publishes evidence-based policy research.

The layers between electricity and a working AI product: energy supply, grid interface and power orchestration beneath the silicon; GPUs and facilities, tenancy, inference engines, engine-side routers, orchestration, inference gateways and model routers above it; and agents and applications at the top. Foundation models sit beside the stack: run at the inference engine and chosen at the model router.

Four things. It publishes open standards and protocols for how the layers connect, with conformance tests. It builds benchmarks and certifies AI systems, including models and agents. It runs a lab working on shared problems such as Indic datasets and tokenizer efficiency. And it researches and assesses AI policy.

Through what every model builder shares: open evaluation in Indian languages, maintained data and language resources, work on tokenizer efficiency, help with access to compute, deployment practice, and a forum for the organisations building models. The support is open to every builder on the same terms, with no exclusive arrangements.

Companies and institutions at every layer of the stack: operators, vendors, model labs, applied AI companies, services firms, start-ups, and academic and research institutions. Individuals can take part in working groups in a personal capacity, with no dues.

Yes. Specifications, test suites and published results are open to everyone, and anyone can run a conformance test. Membership buys a say in governance, not access to the outputs.

Conformance is self-run: an implementer runs AICFI’s open test suite and publishes its own result. Certification is a judgement AICFI makes: it assesses a system against criteria published in advance and grants, suspends or withdraws the certification in public.

Criteria are set by the Technical Council and published before any system is assessed. Individual decisions are made by a Certification Board that nobody with a commercial interest in a system under certification may sit on or direct. Decisions are published with reasons, applicants can appeal, and fees are the same for members and non-members.

No. A certificate says a system met stated criteria on a stated date. AICFI publishes evidence; buyers compare and choose for themselves.

No. It is an independent not-for-profit company. Government bodies are not members, so that evidence government may rely on is published by a body government does not sit inside. People with public-service experience advise AICFI as individuals.

Yes. Researchers are free to publish. AICFI delays publication only to protect confidential material, to allow coordinated disclosure of a security vulnerability, or to keep out unlawful content.

The people who know enough to write a standard work for companies that will implement it. AICFI asks them to disclose their interests in a public register, kept current, and to recuse from decisions about their own organisations. An undisclosed conflict is disqualifying.

By membership dues, grants, corporate social responsibility contributions, and fees for services and events. No funder acquires any right over specification content, evaluation methods or published results.

Write to contact@aicommons.in.