India: New Technology

AI can narrow a thousand profiles down to twenty. Deciding which of those twenty is right for the role still depends on the conversations a recruiter has with candidates and clients.

Generative AI can now reproduce a person's face, voice and mannerisms with a fidelity that the average viewer cannot tell apart from reality. What began as novelty content—face-swapped videos, synthetic voice clips circulated for entertainment—has, since 2023, become a live commercial and reputational threat.

Generative AI can now assist with campaign concepts, generate images and videos, alter backgrounds and styling, create advertising copy, and produce market-specific versions of a campaign at remarkable speed. For fashion brands operating across multiple markets, the commercial attraction is obvious: more content, faster production and greater localization

Clients now come with a problem to solve rather than a role to fill. That shift is changing what secondments are used for, and it may change how General Counsel plan their teams.

When a generative tool can produce a product's shape, packaging, or interface in seconds, the older assumptions behind design law start to strain. This piece asks who counts as the author or applicant when a human prompt and a machine's output are combined, what that combination does to novelty searches and disclosure risk, how ownership is actually allocated in AI platform contracts, and why a design registration is refused, or granted, in ways that copyright and patent protection are not.

When an artificial intelligence system is trained on copyrighted news content, and later answers a user’s question using what it learned, has the law been broken? On 24th July 2026, the Delhi High Court answered that question, at least for now. In ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. Open AI OpCo LLC, Justice Amit Bansal declined to grant an interim injunction against OpenAI, holding, on a prima facie, interim stage view, that the company’s use of ANI’s news content to train its large language models (“LLMs”) falls within the fair dealing exception under Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act, 1957

Patent pendency remains one of the most significant challenges in U.S. patent prosecution. Average first-action wait times range from approximately 20 to 29 months across Technology Centers, creating real costs for startups seeking investor credibility, life sciences companies racing toward product launches, and technology firms defending competitive market position.

In Oil Field Instrumentation India Pvt. Ltd. v. Xcalibur Multiphysics Group S.L. & Ors.1, the Bombay High Court considered a challenge under Section 37 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 (the "Arbitration Act") to an order refusing interim relief under Section 17. The dispute concerned an exclusive joint venture arrangement for conducting airborne geophysical surveys across a defined territory and a contract independently undertaken in Bhutan by an affiliate of one of the joint venture partners.

Artificial intelligence is changing not only how products are developed, but also how inventions are conceived, tested and refined. AI and machine learning systems are increasingly being used to identify new materials, optimise industrial processes, improve medical technologies, detect anomalies, develop software architectures and generate technical solutions that may ultimately form part of a patentable invention.