India: Machine Created Intellectual Asset Bill, 2025 (No. 43 of 2025), including content moderation regulation was introduced to Council of States

On 5 December 2025, the Machine Created Intellectual Asset Bill, 2025 (No. 43 of 2025), including content moderation regulation, was introduced to the Council of States of the Parliament of India. The Bill seeks to establish a legal framework to regulate intellectual and creative outputs generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The Bill applies to AI developers, model providers, platforms, and users of both free and paid AI models. The Bill includes provisions on safe-harbour for AI intermediaries that facilitate access to AI systems, host third-party models or datasets, or passively transmit or store user prompts and outputs as part of AI-related economic activity. The exemption from liability would only apply where the intermediary does not initiate content generation, control output selection, or modify content, and only if the intermediary exercises due diligence in content moderation, traceability and safety measures. Upon receiving actual knowledge or government notice of unlawful activities, intermediaries would have to promptly disable access to or remove the illegal content in question. Further obligations for intermediaries would include establishing clear content governance policies on permitted and prohibited uses and grievance redressal mechanisms. Intermediaries would have to deploy technical safeguards to detect and flag hate speech, child sexual abuse material, non-consensual deepfakes, copyright infringement, and other unlawful outputs, and log and preserve metadata in line with statutory origin-tag standards. Intermediaries are also required to submit periodic transparency reports on content removals, government and regulatory requests, and abuse reports with response times. The Bill would withdraw protection in cases of abetment, monetary gain from unlawful acts, or failure to act on lawful notices.