Project Tapestry completes AI training milestone, expands India and Vietnam collaborations
Two proofs of concept coordinated AI model training across four sites while keeping data local. BharatGen will host a Mumbai workshop on October 15 to plan the next phase of
(L to R) Kaushik Bhatta, Partner, AI Alliance, Consul General Binaya Srikanta Pradhan, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Founding Director of BharatGen and Ritwik Banerjee at the Consulate General of India
NEW DELHI: Project Tapestry, an AI Alliance initiative, has completed its first technical milestone in collaborative AI model training and advanced sovereign AI discussions with India and Vietnam.
The AI Alliance announced the developments in a statement on Tuesday following engagements during United Nations General Assembly Week in New York.
The project is developing an open consortium approach that allows institutions to jointly build foundation models while retaining control over their underlying data, sovereign models and deployments.
According to the Alliance, two proofs of concept coordinated model training across four geographically distributed sites without moving participating institutions’ training data to a central location. Teams also demonstrated adaptations intended to improve a large language model’s understanding of Indian and Vietnamese social and linguistic contexts.
The results provide an initial demonstration of the project’s approach to training models across institutions operating under different infrastructure and jurisdictions. They do not yet establish national-scale deployment.
India’s government-backed, open-source foundation model initiative BharatGen ran one of the proofs of concept with Monash University. The institutions trained jointly across India and Australia while keeping their respective data within their home countries.
The work was conducted under the guidance of Maneesh Singh, Vice-President, Machine Learning, at BharatGen.
During UN General Assembly Week, India’s Consul General in New York, Binaya Srikanta Pradhan, hosted Project Tapestry representatives for discussions on consortium-driven AI development. Participants included BharatGen’s Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Stony Brook University’s Ritwik Banerjee and AI Alliance Partner and Director Kaushik Bhatta.
The briefing also covered Stony Brook University’s recent addition to the consortium. BharatGen will host a Project Tapestry workshop in Mumbai on October 15 to plan the next phases of India’s participation.
In separate engagements, project leaders met Vietnam’s senior political leadership and government ministers to discuss sovereign AI capabilities. The discussions affirmed an intention to collaborate on a model reflecting Vietnamese language, culture, knowledge and national priorities, the Alliance said.
Vietnam has participated in Project Tapestry since its early stages. Hoang Anh Tuan, Vietnam’s Consul General in San Francisco, said the collaboration could help develop domestic technical expertise and institutions capable of operating and adapting AI systems.
Anthony J. Annunziata, Director of Open Source AI at IBM, described the milestone as an initial step towards collaboratively building advanced models while institutions maintain control over their data.
The project’s next phase will expand work on consortium training, cultural alignment and data governance. Contributors also presented a paper examining federated approaches to AI sovereignty at a sovereign AI workshop held alongside ACM HCOMP 2026 in Washington, D.C.
