Google unveils Safety Charter to secure India’s AI-powered digital future

As India rapidly embraces digital transformation, Google has unveiled a comprehensive “Safety Charter” aimed at safeguarding the country's increasingly connected population. Announced during the Safer with Google Summit held in Delhi, the Charter focuses on three key pillars: protecting end users from online scams, ensuring cybersecurity for governments and enterprises, and building AI responsibly.

Speaking at the summit, Preeti Lobana, country manager and VP, Google India, emphasised the need to embed trust into the very fabric of India’s digital growth story. “For the internet to truly serve as a force for good and realise the potential for India and all Indians, safety, security, and trust cannot be an afterthought. It must be planned for in advance,” she said.

Having spent over two decades in the banking sector, Lobana underlined how damaging cyber frauds can be—not just financially but also emotionally—eroding people’s faith in digital platforms. She described AI as both a powerful enabler of security and a partner to human oversight, stating that it helps pre-empt threats, block malicious content, and prevent unauthorised access at scale.

“Trust is the bedrock of our digital aspirations. AI’s adaptability is helping us close—sometimes even eliminate—the gap between defenders and attackers,” she added.

India at the forefront of cyber threats—and solutions

With over 1 billion internet users, of which 59% come from semi-urban regions, India’s internet ecosystem is both vast and vulnerable. Highlighting the magnitude of the threat, Heather Adkins, VP of Security Engineering at Google, revealed that financial frauds averted by Google Pay in 2023 alone were valued at ₹13,000 crore while it is estimated that ₹20,000 crore may be lost to cybercrime in 2025. Meanwhile, Google Play Protect blocked nearly 6 crore high-risk app installation attempts.

“We are seeing threats evolve at machine speed. AI tools like Gemini are helping us react just as fast, improving threat detection by 300% on platforms like VirusTotal,” said Adkins.

She described Google’s work on Project Zero and a research initiative called “Big Sleep,” where AI is used to identify software vulnerabilities in widely used codebases like SQLite—before attackers can exploit them.

“It’s like having a tireless detective, crawling through millions of clues to find the needle in the haystack,” Adkins explained.

Wilson White, Google’s VP for Government Affairs and Public Policy, said that Asia-Pacific has become a hotspot for digital scams, with the region accounting for nearly two-thirds of global fraud losses.

“According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, APAC lost $688 billion to scams last year. AI can be part of the solution, helping us detect 20 times more scamming pages and reduce fake listings by 12 million on Maps,” said White.

He echoed the Charter’s call for multi-sector partnerships, emphasising that tackling AI-driven threats will require collective intelligence-sharing and cooperation between governments, platforms, and users.

Government on alert

The Indian government, too, recognises the dual-edged nature of AI. Alarming figures from the Digital Threat Report 2024 showed a 175% surge in phishing attacks on BFSI entities in early 2024 while the average cost of a data breach in India is estimated at ₹18 crores. Over 50% of business email compromise incidents now involve deepfakes or AI-generated impersonation.

“AI is being used on both sides—both to secure and to attack. We are witnessing deepfake scams, AI-assisted phishing, and intelligent malware creation. This makes AI-driven defence systems and domestic capability-building an urgent priority,” said Dr Chandrika Kaushik, DG (PS&CI) at DRDO, Ministry of Defence.

Kaushik highlighted India’s growing defence through its cybersecurity agency CERT-In, which handled over 14 lakh cybersecurity incidents in 2022 and regularly conducts national-level cyber drills involving more than 1,400 organisations. The agency has also issued a cyber crisis management plan and empanelled over 200 security auditors.

On the innovation front, initiatives like the RBI’s MuleHunter.ai tool and the India AI Cyber Guard Hackathon are leveraging NLP and transaction pattern recognition to detect fraud, while citizen awareness programmes like Cyber Surakshit Bharat are scaling outreach to billions.

“Cyber operations have become strategic tools of warfare. We must now think of cybersecurity as national security,” Kaushik asserted.

Speaking from a policy perspective, Sujeet Kumar, member of Rajya Sabha, contextualised the conversation within the government's Viksit Bharat vision and India's digital ambitions.

“We’re looking at a $1 trillion digital economy by 2027. Already, there are close to a billion Indians online and almost 59% of them are from semi-urban parts of India. In April 2025 alone, we saw 20 billion UPI transactions while in FY24-25, there were 180 billion transactions,” he said.

But with scale comes responsibility. Kumar acknowledged that while India doesn’t want to stifle innovation through overregulation, it also lacks the legislative and regulatory frameworks to fully govern AI today.

“There are no judicial precedents or laws that specifically deal with AI. Yet, cybercriminals are weaponising AI faster than we can respond. That’s why events like the Safer India Summit and Google’s Safety Charter are so important,” he said.

With Google.org committing $5 million, in addition to the pre-existing $50 million, to The Asia Foundation to expand cyber clinics in the region, and collaborations with institutions like IIT-Madras to advance Post-Quantum Cryptography, the company is clearly doubling down on proactive, scalable solutions.

“Safety is a shared responsibility,” said Adkins. “We’re committed to sharing our best tools, research, and partnerships to make sure every Indian can confidently participate in the digital future.”