The AI Alliance has announced that Project Tapestry, its initiative to build advanced AI through a global consortium, has completed its first technical milestone and widened its collaborations with Vietnam and India. The announcements were made during UN General Assembly Week in New York.

According to the AI Alliance, Project Tapestry aims to let nations and institutions work together on increasingly capable foundation models while keeping control of their data, sovereign models and deployments.

What the first milestone showed

The AI Alliance says the milestone demonstrated building blocks that let organizations in different countries, on different infrastructure and under different jurisdictions train and adapt AI models together. Two proofs of concept coordinated model training across four geographically distributed sites, with the underlying training data kept local to each site. Teams also demonstrated cultural alignment, modifying a large language model to better understand the social and linguistic aspects of Indian and Vietnamese cultures.

The AI Alliance describes this as an initial demonstration of one of the project’s central premises: that organizations do not need to centralize their compute or data under a single institution to build capable models together. The release does not name the model used or give performance results.

Vietnam

Leaders of the AI Alliance and Project Tapestry met in New York with Vietnam’s General Secretary and senior government ministers. The discussions affirmed an intention to collaborate on a sovereign AI model aligned with Vietnam’s national AI strategy, including Vietnamese language, culture, knowledge and national use cases. Vietnam has taken part in Project Tapestry since its early stages.

“Project Tapestry gives Viet Nam an opportunity to turn international collaboration into lasting national capability—developing AI that understands our language, culture, knowledge, and priorities, while building the engineers and institutions to operate, adapt, and advance the technology,” said Ambassador Hoang Anh Tuan, Consul General of Viet Nam in San Francisco.

Christopher Nguyen, Chief Architect of Project Tapestry, said, “Across Viet Nam, India, Japan, Bhutan, and beyond, we are building a model for nations to shape the frontier together while preserving sovereignty over their data and technological future.”

India

Consul General Binaya Srikanta Pradhan hosted Project Tapestry leaders at the Consulate General of India in New York. Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan of BharatGen, Prof. Ritwik Banerjee of Stony Brook University and Kaushik Bhatta, Partner and Director at the AI Alliance, briefed him on consortium-driven AI development and on Stony Brook’s recent addition to the consortium. “India is a microcosm of the world. AI built for its languages and cultures preserves agency,” said Pradhan.

BharatGen, India’s government-backed, open-source foundation model stack, ran one of the two proofs of concept under the guidance of Dr Maneesh Singh, VP, Machine Learning at BharatGen. It trained jointly with Monash University across India and Australia, with each institution’s data remaining in its home country. In the same week, the Gates Foundation named Prof. Ramakrishnan a 2026 Goalkeepers Champion for his leadership of BharatGen.

A Project Tapestry workshop will be held in Mumbai on October 15, hosted by BharatGen, to plan the next phases of India’s participation.

Next phase

The AI Alliance says the project is moving into a phase that expands work on consortium training, cultural alignment and data governance. Tapestry contributors also presented a paper, “Sovereignty Through Interdependence: Epistemic Agency, Intelligent Action, and Federated AI,” at the First Workshop on Sovereign AI for Collaborative and Pluralistic AI Ecosystems, co-located with ACM HCOMP 2026 in Washington, D.C. and organized by researchers at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica. Its authors are Dr Maneesh Singh, Ritwik Banerjee, Lav R. Varshney and Kaushik Bhatta.

Anthony J. Annunziata, Director of Open Source AI at IBM, said, “Our first milestone and growing global collaborations demonstrate that Tapestry is moving from architecture to working technology. Organizations operating across countries and infrastructure have now trained models together while maintaining control of their own data. It is an important first step toward building advanced AI collaboratively, openly, and sovereign by design.”

The AI Alliance describes itself as a global nonprofit research and technology organization with more than 200 member organizations across 29 countries.