For long, transparency advocates have decried the Digital Personal Data Protection Act’s dilution of the Right to Information Act, executed by a reduction to Section 8(1)(j), which previously allowed disclosure of personal information with safeguards; that allowance became a full exemption after the DPDP Act was notified in November. Now, civil society groups are considering the next steps, including a legal challenge, to continue their fight against the dilution.

The groups include the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), the Right to Food Campaign, the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights, the National Federation of Indian Women, the Right to Education Campaign, the National Alliance of Peoples’ Movements, People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Internet Freedom Foundation, Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, Common Cause, and Constitutional Conduct Group.

Editorial | Too little, much later: on the Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025

In a meeting in the capital on Wednesday (December 10, 2025), the groups discussed the way forward, and committed to a legal challenge. “It was resolved that the campaign will continue its efforts to raise awareness about the implications of the law and also approach courts to challenge the provisions of the law,” a statement by the Roll Back RTI Amendments Campaign said.

Retired Supreme Court judge and chairman of the United Nations Internal Justice Council Madan B. Lokur assailed the amendments, saying that a full restriction on sharing personal information under the RTI Act would impede public accountability. Citing the example of the blaze in a Goa nightclub on December 6, Mr. Lokur said that government departments could refuse to identify key public officials in responsible positions due to this exemption.

Beyond the RTI Act amendment, the groups discussed other concerns about the DPDP Act. “The chilling impact on activists, journalists, lawyers, political parties, groups and organisations who collect, analyse and disseminate critical information as they will become ‘data fiduciaries’ under the law was discussed,” the statement said. “The excessive centralisation of power in the central government, including the constitution of a government-controlled Data Protection Board with powers to levy penalties of up to ₹250 crore (which can be doubled up to ₹500 crore), raises concerns about the weaponisation of this law against those seeking accountability.”

The Union government is working to make changes to copyright law, necessitated by the new demands of artificial intelligence, within the next three years, a senior official said on Thursday (December 11, 2025).

The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) released a working paper on AI and copyright issues last week. It suggested a “blanket licensing” framework, where websites whose data is crawled by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT would receive royalty payouts through a copyright society which would split the money between them. 

The proposal aims to resolve the growing tensions worldwide between online content publishers (such as book publishers and news organisations) and AI firms, who “train” their LLMs with a large amount of text data, usually scraped from the public internet. Publishers have argued that they need to be compensated because of their contribution in developing and improving these models. 

The DPIIT proposal suggests generally allowing the scraping of content by AI developers while ensuring that they eventually pay content publishers.

Payout post-commercialisation

This will be followed in about two months by another working paper that will look into whether AI-generated works are copyrightable, and how authorship is decided for them, DPIIT Additional Secretary Himani Pande said in a news briefing. Following this, the government is likely to move an amendment to the Copyright Act, 1957 in Parliament to establish the new regime.

Ms. Pande said that the copyright society, known as the Copyright Royalties Collective for AI Training (CRCAT), would only seek payments from AI firms once they commercialise their models, as opposed to when they are mining data from the internet to develop or train them.

The compensation of copyright holders has been a contentious issue, with news publishers in particular suing AI firms around the world. Newswire agency ANI (from which The Hindu syndicates video content) and The New York Times are among those who have sued ChatGPT developer OpenAI for allegedly regurgitating their content in chat conversations. OpenAI has denied their accusations.

AI firms dissent

Tech industry body Nasscom, which had one seat in the committee that drafted this report, dissented from the model proposed by the DPIIT. The body, which represents Google, Meta, Amazon, and other large firms with significant AI investments, said that publishers should be able to opt out of including their data in training models, warning that a blanket licensing model could expose firms to further disputes.

In a note shared with The Hindu, a Big Tech firm that develops AI models raised specific concerns about the DPIIT proposal. “As per stated copyright jurisprudence, the burden of proof to establish infringement is on the copyright owner who is making the claim,” the note says. “The Hybrid proposal reverses this. It is well established in copyright law that in a copyright infringement suit, the plaintiff (content owner) must prove that the defendant (AI developer) [infringed their copyright]. If the burden of proof is on the AI Developer then they have to prove that they have not used the content owner’s material even if the output is similar. This is extremely onerous and technically infeasible because Gen AI tools are probabilistic and not deterministic.”

Ms. Pande said that firms’ inputs would be taken into consideration as the consultation process continues.

OpenAI said on Wednesday the cyber capabilities of its artificial intelligence models are increasing and warned that upcoming models are likely to pose a “high” cybersecurity risk.

The AI models might either develop working zero-day remote exploits against well-defended systems or assist with complex enterprise or industrial intrusion operations aimed at real-world effects, the ChatGPT maker said in a blog post.

As capabilities advance, OpenAI said it is “investing in strengthening models for defensive cybersecurity tasks and creating tools that enable defenders to more easily perform workflows such as auditing code and patching vulnerabilities”.

To counter cybersecurity risks, OpenAI said it is relying on a mix of access controls, infrastructure hardening, egress controls and monitoring.

Billionaire Elon Musk on Wednesday hinted at a possible SpaceX initial public offering in a social media exchange with Ars Technica space journalist Eric Berger, following reports of a possible listing of the rocket maker in 2026.

“As usual, Eric is accurate,” Musk said, in reply to Berger’s post saying “Here’s why I think SpaceX is going public soon,” that linked his Ars Technica article on SpaceX’s plans to go public.

Reuters and others reported on Tuesday that SpaceX was looking to raise more than $25 billion through an IPO in 2026, a move that could boost the rocket-maker’s valuation to more than $1 trillion.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The California-based company ranks as the world’s second most-valuable private startup after ChatGPT maker OpenAI, according to data from Crunchbase.

SpaceX going public at the reported valuation would represent the second-richest completed IPO in history, after Saudi Aramco’s blockbuster $1.7 trillion listing in 2019.

Reuters earlier reported that SpaceX has started discussions with banks about launching the offering around June or July next year.

OnePlus on Thursday (December 11, 2025) revealed the Ace Edition of OnePlus 15R which will be launched alongside the OnePlus 15R Charcoal Black and Mint Green shades and OnePlus Pad Go 2 on December 17. The OnePlus 15R will come in Electric Violet colour.

The Chinese smartphone maker said, “OnePlus 15R is the ultimate value flagship, and the OnePlus 15R Ace Edition is perfect for those who wish to declare themselves the ultimate Ace gamer.”

The Ace Edition will have a fiberglass back cover with the word Ace inscribed on it.

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OnePlus 15R Ace Edition is going to run the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset along with 15R. It will ship with a 7,400 mAh battery.

OnePlus 15R Ace Edition will be launched on Amazon and OnePlus.