new delhi, June 21 -- India's mushrooming AI-focused startups are attracting a lot of buzz, but a lack of innovation and groundbreaking research means the country is way behind the US and China in the tussle for AI supremacy.This is a result of what the industry calls 'secondary' innovation-technologies that cannot be patented worldwide to influence global economics in the long run. Spending on foundational engineering, research and development (ER&D) work in AI is minuscule, at least five executives involved in AI-related work told Mint. In November, the World Intellectual Property Organization (Wipo's) annual report said that India was the sixth region in the world in terms of overall patent applications-behind China, the US, Japan, Korea and the European Union. However, the gap was stark-China filed 1.7 million patents through 2024, almost 3x more than the US, with 600,000 patents. India filed only 90,000 patents-5% of what China did. The gap is even more evident in generative AI, the core battlefield in global technology right now. Last year, China filed over 38,000 patents in generative AI with Wipo ahead of the US with around 6,500 patents. India ranked sixth here too with 1,350 patents in generative AI-3.5% of China's advancements and around a fifth of the US. Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union minister for electronics and IT, promised last month that "India's first foundational AI model is still on track to be released by the end of this year". Yet, the patent filings suggest a US-China war for AI supremacy threatens to leave India out of the league of nations that would influence global innovation and economy over the next decades. US-based Essential AI, founded by Ashish Vaswani, former Google Brain engineer who co-invented the transformer model that backs generative AI, emerged from stealth in December 2023 with a $56.5-million series-A funding round....