Synopsis
US export controls on advanced AI models have spurred India's call for sovereign AI development. Industry leaders warn against reliance on foreign providers, urging a national mission for indigenous AI capabilities, similar to UPI and Aadhaar, to secure India's technological future and support local startups.Listen to this article in summarized format
They argued that India needs to build its own AI capabilities, much like it did with digital public infra like UPI and Aadhaar.
Call for prioritising
“If this is not a wake-up call for the country, I don't know what is,” said Aakrit Vaish, cofounder of AI-focused early stage venture capital firm Activate. “India needs mission-driven teams focused on long-term AI research and development, backed by sustained capital and policy support.”
In a statement on June 12, Anthropic said the US government had issued an “expert control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national inside or outside the US including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.”
Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are Anthropic's latest large language models built for advanced reasoning and agentic tasks.
For investors and founders, the stoppage reinforces a broader message: AI is increasingly becoming strategic infrastructure, and relying on a single provider is no longer a sustainable long-term strategy. Several described AI as a new supply chain risk.
