A sovereign AI foundation model and a unified sovereign GenAI platform, EKAM, have been developed from the ground up for military use to operate entirely within the Indian Army’s air-gapped, secure environment.

In just over a year, Neuralix delivered both the military foundation model and the GenAI platform, enabling potential expansion to additional military agents, decision-support tools, and edge deployments while maintaining strict governance for new deployments.

EKAM serves as a secure platform hosting multiple AI models and defense-use cases, running in an air-gapped network and capable of integrating the military foundation model with specialized small language models, ensuring sovereignty of models, data, and infrastructure.

The project emphasizes three layers of sovereignty: model sovereignty under Army control, data sovereignty keeping confidential Army data inside the Army environment, and infrastructure sovereignty with all systems running on Army-controlled compute and networks, free from public cloud reliance.

Development is conducted under the Army’s AI-as-a-Service program within the iDEX ADITI 2.0 framework, with governance by DGIS and contracting by the Defence Innovation Organisation.

Contact: Tarang Singh, Neuralix AI Pvt. Ltd., [email protected].

Engineering challenges included operating without external repositories or cloud services due to the air gap; Neuralix securely imported dependencies and adapted software for the restricted environment using a forward-deployed approach within Army facilities.

The initiative reflects a broader national strategy to keep AI models, data, and infrastructure under government control for critical defense applications, outlining a sovereign military AI pathway centered on Army needs and control.

The foundation model uses its own architecture and weights, tailored to defense terminology, doctrine, and military documents, and employs a Mixture-of-Experts design to provide structured insights for authorized military users.