India AI Impact Summit: Bharat1 Unveils Plan for ‘Humanity-First’ AI City in Bengaluru

The second day of the first AI Impact Summit held in New Delhi was marked by a very interesting announcement. A Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup, Bharat1, has planned to build the world's first 'humanity-first' AI city in Bengaluru. Even though the idea of having an AI city sounds impressive, the researchers are not attempting to control a city using an AI model. They are simply attempting to build a simulation of a city where the AI agents and physical AI can be stress-tested.

In a press release, the startup presented its vision for a city-scale research and infrastructure initiative. Bharat1 stated that the deployment of increasingly advanced AI systems has raised concerns about safety, reliability, and alignment. The post further stated, "While large language models have demonstrated tremendous potential in language and coding, intelligence built solely on internet-scale data will not provide a sufficient foundation for next-generation autonomous and physical systems."

For Bharat1, the solution to the problem is validated, real-world intelligence based on real-world data. For the first step of its moonshot project, the startup has proposed a 500,000 sq ft AI research and innovation campus in Sarjapura, Bengaluru. This location will feature facilities for model training, fine-tuning, and inference, plug-and-play labs, connectivity to AI cloud services, and more.

Meanwhile, the startup wants to develop and stress-test a universal basic intelligence framework in controlled, real-world conditions, build open city-scale world models using structured, high-quality multimodal data, and create robust validation layers for agentic and physical AI systems before deploying them at scale.