AI FIRMS ARE TYING UP TO BUNDLE AI services at no extra cost – effectively offering “free AI” in exchange for user data.
In July 2025, Bharti Airtel rolled out a scheme giving 360 million customers a year of Perplexity Pro (which normally costs ₹17,000) for free. Reports suggest that Reliance Jio is also in talks to distribute generative AI (ChatGPT in this case) - planning an “AI cloud” for users. At first glance, these offers democratise cutting-edge tools. But beneath the surface lies a quid-pro-quo: users gain free AI services while implicitly supplying rich personal data and queries back to the providers.
This nexus – reaching into AI, satellites and cloud – raises core questions of digital privacy, consent and constitutional values.
Are users knowingly consenting to heavy data harvesting? Does India’s patchwork data regime and absence of a specific AI law give enough clarity?
What does the Constitution’s right to privacy and dignity demand in an era of ubiquitous data-driven services? And how do these tie-ups compare with global norms like the EU AI Act or U.S. privacy enforcement?
Bundling AI and data
Airtel’s partnership with Perplexity illustrates the model. By clicking into Airtel’s app, a user can “claim” a complimentary Perplexity Pro subscription. The telecom touts this as a user benefit (an annual AI assistant now within reach), but one must note this also turns users into data sources.
Perplexity’s own terms admit that it collects user queries and input to improve its services. Here, the concern is that Perplexity will use users’ data to train their AI models, given the service routes the user prompts through large third-party models like GPT-4 or Claude.
