NEW DELHI, February 17, 2026 — Today, at the India AI Impact Summit held at Bharat Mandapam, the Datasphere Initiative released its flagship report, “Sandboxes for DPI: Co-creating the blocks of digital trust.” The publication establishes the first analysis and global mapping of sandboxes specifically designed for Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).
The report was launched during the session “AI-DPI experimentation and the role of Sandboxes,” co-led by the Datasphere Initiative, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and Kalpa Impact. This event serves as a formal follow-up to the December 2025 pre-summit dialogue, where international experts emphasized that iterative experimentation is the primary mechanism for ensuring that AI-powered infrastructure remains inclusive and accountable.
The India AI Impact Summit: A Global Platform for Digital Governance
India’s role as a global architect of Digital Public Infrastructure, a field it has pioneered for more than ten years, provides the definitive context for the Datasphere Initiative’s latest research. The India AI Impact Summit serves as a critical junction where the summit’s ‘Safe and Trusted AI’ agenda meets the practical need for robust testing environments.
This platform was selected for the release of the global mapping because it represents the epicenter of digital public innovation. The report provides the necessary regulatory and technical vocabulary to support the Summit’s mission of building inclusive, resilient, and safe digital systems for all.
Speaking on the significance of the global mapping, Lorrayne Porciuncula, Executive Director of the Datasphere Initiative, noted that the field of DPI governance has reached a turning point: “The era of deploying rigid systems and fixing them later is incompatible with the public interest. We are providing the vocabulary needed to move from policy theory to operational reality. By establishing the first global analysis and mapping for DPI sandboxes, we are giving policymakers the evidence base to stress-test their infrastructure upstream, ensuring that safeguards are validated in the real world, not just on paper.”
Defining an emerging Global Standard for DPI Sandboxes
As the organization that established the original taxonomy for sandboxes, the Datasphere Initiative’s new report aims to standardize a field that is currently nascent but rapidly evolving. By providing the first-ever global mapping of sandboxes for DPI, the report distinguishes between generic innovation tools and the specialized requirements of infrastructure-level testing.
Building on the typology first established in the Datasphere Initiative’s 2022 report Sandboxes for Data — a framework referenced by the OECD and others — this publication offers updated, more robust definitions to reflect the sector’s growing complexity. It sharpens the distinction between regulatory, operational, and hybrid sandboxes, providing a matured classification for this fast-moving ecosystem.
In a major step for the field, the report proposes the first-ever definition of a “DPI Sandbox,” distinguishing these environments by their specific focus on testing foundational infrastructure layers before they are deployed at scale.
This framework is applied to a global mapping of 16 identified DPI sandbox initiatives, comprising 14 national and 2 multi-country projects ranging from India’s Aadhaar and RBI ecosystems to the European Digital Identity Wallet and Saudi Arabia’s Tawakkalna. This mapping reveals a critical shift toward “upstream” operational sandboxes, where core components like payment rails and identity wallets are stress-tested before they reach population scale.
The AI-DPI Nexus and the Path to Sandbox as a Laboratory for Trust
The report addresses a central theme of the New Delhi summit: the integration of AI into foundational digital layers. Sandboxes provide a controlled environment to evaluate how AI-enabled capabilities — such as fraud detection, biometric matching, and multilingual interfaces — interact with public rights and institutional oversight.
Morine Amutorine, Africa Sandboxes Forum Lead for the Datasphere Initiative, emphasized that this is particularly vital for diverse and resource-constrained contexts: “In the Global South, the cost of technology failure is too high to ignore. By establishing this global map and analysis, we are giving policymakers the tools to experiment with systems upstream, ensuring social legitimacy is built into the architecture from the start.”
A Roadmap for Action in 2026
The publication of this report initiates a broader roadmap for the Datasphere Initiative. Throughout 2026, the organization will move from theory to practice by developing a “How-to” Toolkit for DPI Sandboxes in the context of the Global Sandbox Forum.
These frameworks will also be central to the 2026 Sandbox Summer School in Lisbon, where a dedicated DPI track will allow governments and innovators to apply the report’s typology to solve real-world infrastructure challenges, ensuring that the next generation of digital public infrastructure is built on a foundation of verified trust.
Access the Full Report: Sandboxes for DPI
The post Sandboxes for DPI: The Datasphere Initiative launches global report at India AI Impact Summit appeared first on The Datasphere Initiative.