Washington- Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Donald Trumpinfo-icon on Thursday (February 13, 2025) kick-started a new initiative named Autonomous Systems Industry Alliance (ASIAinfo-icon) to scale industry partnerships and production in the Indo-Pacific.

According to the statement, the Autonomous Systems Industry Alliance refers to Indiainfo-icon-U.S. cooperation in the area of underwater domain awareness technologies.

"The U.S. has offered a few co-production and co-development opportunities for UDA technologies, on a commercial basis. India is the very first country with whom U.S. defence industry has offered to work with on these sensitive technologies." the statement added.

India is currently in discussion with some of the U.S. companies for technologies like Sea Picket autonomous surveillance system with sonar acoustic array, Wave Glider unmanned surface vehicle systems, Low Frequency Active Towed Sonar.

Earlier Prime Minister Narendra Modi held talks with USinfo-icon President Donald Trump at the White House.

At his Oval Office, Trump welcomed Modi with a warm hug before settling down for the crucial talks, hours after the American President announced a new reciprocal tariff policy for all the trading partners of the US.

While announcing the new tariff policy, the President also spoke about how India is "right at the top of the pack" when it comes to tariffs.

Before meeting Trump, the Indian prime minister held separate talks with US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, billionaire Elon Musk and Republican leader Vivek Ramaswamy.

Modi kicked off his two-day visit to Washington DC on Wednesday evening (Thursday morning India time) after concluding his trip to Franceinfo-icon.

Ahead of the Modi-Trump meeting, diplomatic sources indicated that the focus of the talks will be on enhancing cooperation in areas of defence, energy, technologyinfo-icon, infrastructure and trade.

The Trump administration is particularly keen on expanding Washington's defence sales to India and the two sides may broadly finalise a couple of deals including co-production of Stryker armoured fighting vehicles in India.

Besides defence, trade is set to be a high priority area in the deliberations between the two leaders. The reciprocal tariff policy is expected to have some impact on India's trade with US also.

Two days back, Trump announced a 25 per cent tariff on global steel and aluminium imports into the US. The move is expected to hit the Indian firms exporting steel and aluminium to the US.