On February 13, 2025, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and United States President Donald Trump met at the White House. Prime Minister Modi was on an official working visit to the United States. A seven-page-long joint statement followed. It covered a range of issue areas for cooperation: defense, trade and investment, energy security, technology and innovation, multilateral cooperation, and people-to-people cooperation. Importantly, the “leaders announced the launch of the U.S.-India TRUST (Transforming the Relationship Utilizing Strategic Technology) initiative.”
This essay explains what the TRUST initiative is, breaking down some of its key parts. It begins by providing a context for the TRUST initiative, which will need to be kept squarely in mind as officials and others in both countries work toward delivering on the initiative. This essay is based on the limited publications and news reports on and around the joint statement. Importantly, it is also based on conversations with officials, industry leaders, academics, and other experts from both countries between February and April 2025. Clearly, it’s early days for the TRUST initiative, and the initiative is likely to expand in different ways as discussions get deeper and wider in the following months.
Context for the TRUST Initiative
“Nothing in the joint statement was easy, there were several lines that needed intense dialogue,” argued one of the negotiators. “The part that was relatively easier was the section on technology,” said another. What became clear was that the joint statement was designed to serve as the roadmap for cooperation and delivery. Time stamps were also embedded into the statement. The need for delivery in “this year”—in 2025—was mentioned five times across the different sections of the statement. To be clear, almost every discussion on the TRUST initiative is pegged to the commitments made in the joint statements. These are “to do’s” that officials will need to justify to each other at regular intervals.
Both sides had committed to a “results-driven agenda with initial outcomes this year to demonstrate the level of trust for a mutually beneficial partnership.” It is abundantly clear that “delivery” is the operative moving term.1 Subsequently, what has become clearer, especially to Indian officials and political leaders, is that the 3,054-word statement hinged in large part on a U.S-India Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA).
What is also apparent is that amending the Indian Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act (CLNDA) and the Atomic Energy Act is of paramount importance to the White House as well as the Indian leaders. If both sets of amendments can be made in this calendar year, it will open the pathway for genuine private sector participation in India’s civil nuclear energy future. Several companies are lining up with well-calibrated pitches to sell reactors to India and embed new industry alliances. Trade and the CLNDA have been set up by the White House as a litmus test for the roadmap more broadly. The refrain amongst insiders is that “some things can move in parallel, and will need to, but these key issues will ultimately shade all else.”2 This context is critical.
One of the key pillars of the statement that is being negotiated in parallel is on and around the new India-U.S. TRUST initiative: transforming the relationship utilizing strategic technologies. The first India-U.S. Track 1.5 meeting on the TRUST initiative was hosted by Carnegie India in New Delhi in March 2025. A set of four other closed-door meetings on the initiative with Indian and U.S. officials, industry leaders, experts, and interlocutors took place in New Delhi and also at Carnegie India’s Global Technology Summit in April 2025. Industry bodies have hosted several meetings too. For most participants, India-U.S. strategic technology cooperation is hardly new.
This ecosystem, if it can be called that, has been part of forceful discussions over the last three years. They were designed to support the India-U.S. initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET), which was officially launched in January 2023 by National Security Advisors (NSAs) Ajit Doval and Jake Sullivan. This was one of the hallmarks of the Biden administration. It was an initiative anchored by the respective NSAs. It committed officials on both sides to coordinate to deliver on a range of deals and outcomes, more successfully in semiconductors, defense, space, and in creating a formal dialogue process to discuss export controls. It was less successful in seeding lines of cooperation in areas such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and quantum technology.
In one sense, the baton for technology cooperation was not only picked up but also reimagined by the Trump administration, and Indian officials are ambitious about the TRUST initiative. As one official stated soon after the joint statement was published, “the Trump team went much further than we expected.”3 This sentiment for ambition is more than clear in interactions with American officials as well. “We want things done,” is the chorus that echoes between Pennsylvania Avenue and Foggy Bottom.
The TRUST Initiative: Transforming the Relationship Utilizing Strategic Technology
The TRUST initiative is designed to “catalyze government-to-government, academia and private sector collaboration” with the intent to “promote application of critical and emerging technologies.” These include mutually inclusive verticals such as defense, AI, semiconductors, biotechnology, energy, and space. With the view to develop long-standing partnerships in these technology areas, there is equal attention given to “encouraging the use of verified technology vendors and ensuring sensitive technologies are protected.” This is key to U.S. officials.
One of the easier parts to negotiate in the joint statement was the segment on AI, officials from both sides claim.4 There is a clear realization on both sides that the AI dialogue was one that was largely absent in the Biden years. The “Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion” announced by the Biden administration just before it left office placed India in a second tier. Restrictions were placed in this category of countries “on the total computing power they can import, unless that computing power is hosted in trusted and secure environments.”
For those in India, the analogy was simple. The idea of the iCET was to create a business class corridor for cooperation, but the diffusion rules placed India on the back of coach. To be clear, this was a global framework. Those batting for India in the Biden White House lost this battle to a larger set of imperatives driving controls that were focused on China.
“As a central pillar of the TRUST initiative,” President Trump and Prime Minister Modi have “put forward a U.S.-India Roadmap on Accelerating AI Infrastructure.” This is to be created in the current calendar year. The aim is to mitigate frictions and create pathways “to enable industry partnerships and investments in next generation data centers … access to compute and processors for AI” without losing sight of “protection and controls necessary to protect these technologies.” The work on the roadmap has already started, in advance of Vice President J. D. Vance’s visit to India in April 2025.
There is a firm belief that a roadmap will need to be clearly articulated by the time President Trump is expected to come to India for a Quad Leaders’ Summit in the last quarter of 2025. As mentioned above, the timelines for delivery are paramount in the TRUST initiative. There is an expectation that to enable such cooperation, the Framework for AI Diffusion will need to be reconsidered. There is also considerable domestic push within the United States to simplify the diffusion rule.
As the loss of momentum on AI during the Biden years is being renegotiated under the TRUST initiative, so is the verve to do more on biopharma. There is a laser-sharp focus in the White House to “build trusted and resilient supply chains,” a vision shared by Indian officials. On pharmaceuticals, and as far as U.S. officials are concerned, the aim is twofold: to derisk the access to top active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) from China and encourage investments from Indian pharmaceutical companies into the United States. Discussions on where these land have started. The outcomes might need to be adjusted depending on how the discussions on creating a business case for both these propositions go.
Officials on both sides have clearly spent time to plug the gaps in the iCET and chart a course to go further in areas where early investments were made during the Biden years. The one area of continuation is clearly reflected in the launch of INDUS Innovation, “a new innovation bridge modelled after the successful INDUS-X platform.” The aim is to create an innovation ecosystem that will “advance U.S.-India industry and academic partnerships and foster investments in space, energy, and other emerging technologies.” To realize this potential, both sides have committed themselves to “review their respective arms transfer regulations.” This will be key from the Indian perspective.
Both sides have also bet on the INDUS-X initiative started during the Biden years. There will be a summit sometime in 2025, possibly when the U.S. NSA is able to visit India. A trip scheduled for April 2025 was canceled. Expectedly, this is also when the TRUST initiative will be formally launched.
Conclusion
The motivation behind the TRUST initiative is to continue to grow the ecosystem for innovation and investments within secure supply chains between the United States and India. There is a much stronger drive to deliver on very specific outcomes on an elaborate and well-designed infrastructure roadmap for AI, pharma, nuclear cooperation, and other technology areas. The business-like approach, as seen thus far, is focused on making investments happen and clearing the pathway for the same in both countries. What’s missing, to those on the outside, is the strategic articulation of where India stands in the imagination of the White House and in other government offices in Washington D.C. That both leaders share a unique connection is without doubt, as is the fact that both sides have moved at lightning speed to move the TRUST initiative and other parts of the roadmap.
Yet, for those in India, there was some comfort during the Biden years that while the India-U.S. ties were in themselves strategically beneficial, China played an important role in motivating officials to work overtime in clearing the path for the delivery of jet engines, semiconductor plants, and armed drones. The China argument, at least for the moment, is muted in the transactions highlighted above. Apart from the verve to derisk pharmaceutical supply chains from China, U.S. officials have gone out of their way to make clear that the TRUST initiative is about the bilateral relationship only. The grammatical construct is to keep China out of this equation. In the end, whether the implicit or explicit articulation of the China factor, as it were, is important or not in the delivery of the initiative is yet to be seen.
Lastly, the iCET was clearly placed under the stewardship of the respective NSAs and their secretariats with the active support of the Ministry of External Affairs in India and the State Department in the United States. As yet, and at least in the public domain, there is nothing to suggest that this structure will remain. There is some discussion about the deputy NSAs leading this effort.5 This would be a mistake. It would be safe to say that the TRUST initiative will require the trust of the fragmented bureaucracies in both countries. The NSAs leading this effort sends the much-needed signal that this unique initiative is backed directly by the principals who have given expression to their intent in the February joint statement. To this end, and with the view to galvanize the momentum for deliverables in this calendar year, the NSAs should meet soon and launch the TRUST initiative with partners across industry, academia, and think tanks.
Notes
1Author’s conversations with officials in Washington D.C. and India in February and March 2025.
2Note: These sentiments were made clear in three closed door U.S.-India Track 1.5 meetings hosted by Carnegie India in March and April 2025.
3Author’s conversations with officials in Washington D.C. and India in February and March 2025.
4Author’s conversations with officials in Washington D.C. and India in February and March 2025.
5Author’s conversations with officials in April 2025.
