India has 'no basis' to seek WTO consultations on auto tariffs: US
Last week, India sought consultations with the US after Washington adopted a measure in the form of a
tariff increase
of 25% ad valorem on imports of passenger vehicles and light trucks, and certain automobile parts originating in or from India.
The measure on automobile parts applied from May 3, 2025, and for an unlimited duration.
On Monday, Washington informed the WTO that the tariffs on autos were imposed pursuant to Section 232, which is a national security statute, and the US is "maintaining these actions pursuant to the essential security exception" in the global trade rules.
Insisting that it did not act pursuant to Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974, under which it imposes safeguard measures, the US said, "These actions are not safeguard measures and, therefore, there is no basis to conduct consultations under the Agreement on Safeguards with respect to these measures."
India had said that the US failed to notify the WTO Committee on safeguards under a provision of the Agreement on Safeguards (AoS) on taking a decision to apply the safeguard measure.
The US imported $89 billion worth of auto parts globally last year, with Mexico accounting for $36 billion, China for $10.1 billion, and India for just $2.2 billion.
Washington has given a similar response to New Delhi's proposal to impose retaliatory duties on 29 American products including apples, almonds, pears, anti-freezing preparations, boric acid and certain products made of iron and steel to counter the American tariffs on steel and aluminium in the name of safeguard measures. New Delhi told the WTO that these measures would affect $7.6 billion imports into the US.
The issues at the WTO are coming up at a time when the two sides are negotiating a
Bilateral Trade Agreement
(BTA). American trade officials were in New Delhi from June 4-10 for the trade pact talks.
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Business Standard
21 minutes ago
- Business Standard
Trump's order to block 'woke' AI spurs tech giants to censor their chatbots
Tech companies looking to sell their artificial intelligence technology to the federal government must now contend with a new regulatory hurdle: proving their chatbots aren't woke. President Donald Trump's sweeping new plan to counter China in achieving global dominance in AI promises to cut regulations and cement American values into the AI tools increasingly used at work and home. But one of Trump's three AI executive orders signed Wednesday the one preventing woke AI in the federal government marks the first time the US government has explicitly tried to shape the ideological behavior of AI. Several leading providers of the AI language models targeted by the order products like Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot have so far been silent on Trump's anti-woke directive, which still faces a study period before it gets into official procurement rules. While the tech industry has largely welcomed Trump's broader AI plans, the anti-woke order forces the industry to leap into a culture war battle or try their best to quietly avoid it. It will have massive influence in the industry right now, especially as tech companies are already capitulating to other Trump administration directives, said civil rights advocate Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, senior director of The Leadership Conference's Center for Civil Rights and Technology. The move also pushes the tech industry to abandon years of work to combat the pervasive forms of racial and gender bias that studies and real-world examples have shown to be baked into AI systems. First off, there's no such thing as woke AI, Montoya-Boyer said. There's AI technology that discriminates and then there's AI technology that actually works for all people. Molding the behaviors of AI large language models is challenging because of the way they're built and the inherent randomness of what they produce. They've been trained on most of what's on the internet, reflecting the biases of all the people who've posted commentary, edited a Wikipedia entry or shared images online. This will be extremely difficult for tech companies to comply with, said former Biden official Jim Secreto, who was deputy chief of staff to US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, an architect of many of Biden's AI industry initiatives. Large language models reflect the data they're trained on, including all the contradictions and biases in human language. Tech workers also have a say in how they're designed, from the global workforce of annotators who check their responses to the Silicon Valley engineers who craft the instructions for how they interact with people. Trump's order targets those top-down efforts at tech companies to incorporate what it calls the destructive ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion into AI models, including concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism. The directive has invited comparison to China's heavier-handed efforts to ensure that generative AI tools reflect the core values of the ruling Communist Party. Secreto said the order resembles China's playbook in using the power of the state to stamp out what it sees as disfavored viewpoints." The method is different, with China relying on direct regulation by auditing AI models, approving them before they are deployed and requiring them to filter out banned content such as the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989. Trump's order doesn't call for any such filters, relying on tech companies to instead show that their technology is ideologically neutral by disclosing some of the internal policies that guide the chatbots. The Trump administration is taking a softer but still coercive route by using federal contracts as leverage, Secreto said. That creates strong pressure for companies to self-censor in order to stay in the government's good graces and keep the money flowing. The order's call for truth-seeking AI echoes the language of the president's one-time ally and adviser Elon Musk, who has made it the mission of the Grok chatbot made by his company xAI. But whether Grok or its rivals will be favored under the new policy remains to be seen. Despite a rhetorically pointed introduction laying out the Trump administration's problems with DEI, the actual language of the order's directives shouldn't be hard for tech companies to comply with, said Neil Chilson, a Republican former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission. It doesn't even prohibit an ideological agenda, just that any intentional methods to guide the model be disclosed, said Chilson, head of AI policy at the nonprofit Abundance Institute. Which is pretty light touch, frankly. Chilson disputes comparisons to China's cruder modes of AI censorship. There is nothing in this order that says that companies have to produce or cannot produce certain types of output, he said. It says developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments. With their AI tools already widely used in the federal government, tech companies have reacted cautiously. OpenAI on Thursday said it is awaiting more detailed guidance but believes its work to make ChatGPT objective already makes the technology consistent with Trump's directive. Microsoft, a major supplier of online services to the government, declined to comment. Musk's xAI, through spokesperson Katie Miller, a former Trump official, pointed to a company comment praising Trump's AI announcements but didn't address the procurement order. xAI recently announced it was awarded a US defense contract for up to $200 million, just days after Grok publicly posted a barrage of antisemitic commentary that praised Adolf Hitler. Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Palantir didn't respond to emailed requests for comment Thursday. The ideas behind the order have bubbled up for more than a year on the podcasts and social media feeds of Trump's top AI adviser David Sacks and other influential Silicon Valley venture capitalists, many of whom endorsed Trump's presidential campaign last year. Their ire centered on Google's February 2024 release of an AI image-generating tool that produced historically inaccurate images before the tech giant took down and fixed the product. Google later explained that the errors including generating portraits of Black, Asian and Native American men when asked to show American Founding Fathers were the result of an overcompensation for technology that, left to its own devices, was prone to favoring lighter-skinned people because of pervasive bias in the systems. Trump allies alleged that Google engineers were hard-coding their own social agenda into the product. It's 100 per cent intentional, said prominent venture capitalist and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen on a podcast in December. That's how you get Black George Washington at Google. There's override in the system that basically says, literally, Everybody has to be Black.' Boom. There's squads, large sets of people, at these companies who determine these policies and write them down and encode them into these systems. Sacks credited a conservative strategist who has fought DEI initiatives at colleges and workplaces for helping to draft the order. When they asked me how to define woke,' I said there's only one person to call: Chris Rufo. And now it's law: the federal government will not be buying WokeAI, Sacks wrote on X. Rufo responded that he helped identify DEI ideologies within the operating constitutions of these systems. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Time of India
44 minutes ago
- Time of India
Rs 156cr in FY25: N Chandrasekaran among highest-paid chiefs
Tata Sons executive chairman N Chandrasekaran (Pic credit: PTI) MUMBAI: N Chandrasekaran, who heads Tata Sons, the principal entity of the $180-billion Tata Group, saw his compensation increase to Rs 156 crore in FY25. It makes him one of the highest-paid professional chieftains in India Inc, who earn more than Rs 150 crore annually. His earnings increased by 15% from the Rs 135 crore he received in FY24. Since taking on the role of Tata Sons chairman in Feb 2017, Chandrasekaran's remuneration has seen significant growth, especially when compared to his initial compensation of Rs 55 crore in FY18. CMS Info Systems' vice-chairman Rajiv Kaul earned Rs 181 crore in FY24, Persistent Systems' CEO Sandeep Kalra took home Rs 148 crore in FY25. There are a few executives in the Rs 100-crore remuneration club, including Bajaj Finance's Rajeev Jain, who took home Rs 102 crore in FY25. Meanwhile, Tata Group's semiconductor manufacturing business has emerged as a significant revenue generator within just five years of its inception, ranking as the sixth-largest contributor despite challenges. Tata Electronics, which began operations in 2020, recorded Rs 66,601 crore revenue in FY25, with a modest deficit of Rs 70 crore. The relatively small loss indicates potential profitability in the near future. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like American Investor Warren Buffett Recommends: 5 Books For Turning Your Life Around Blinkist: Warren Buffett's Reading List Undo The company's growth trajectory includes strategic acquisitions, comprising the Rs 1,078 crore purchase of Wistron India in 2024, and a Rs 1,650 crore investment for a 60% stake in Pegatron India. In the capital-intensive world of technology hardware, I am told this is a good start." Tata Sons invested Rs 3,000 crore in Tata Electronics in FY25, the holdco's FY25 report showed. The aviation business, a recent addition to the Tata Group's portfolio, generated Rs 78,636 crore in revenue, ranking fourth in revenue contribution, after Tata Steel (Rs 2.2 lakh crore), TCS (Rs 2.6 lakh crore) and Tata Motors (Rs 4.5 lakh). However, Air India emerged as the conglomerate's biggest loss-making entity in FY25. In FY25, Air India, which was acquired by Tata Sons in 2022, received an investment of Rs 3,225 crore from the parent. Tata Digital, which runs the Tata Neu super app, registered the second-highest loss, amounting to Rs 4,610 crore. In FY25, Tata Sons infused Rs 3,960 crore in Tata Digital. The biggest profit contributors to the nearly 160-year-old Tata Group was TCS (Rs 48,797 crore). Stay informed with the latest business news, updates on bank holidays and public holidays . AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
US FCC clears way for $8 billion Paramount-Skydance merger
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