US curbs on Anthropic's hot AI models are a wake-up call for us

Indian users should be thankful that open-source alternatives exist that could serve most purposes

- RAVI VENKATESAN

Last week, Anthropic was forced to suspend Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5—its most capable artificial intelligence (AI) models ever, pulled just days after public release—after US national security authorities flagged concerns about the system being jailbroken.

Every Indian senior executive and technology leader should read that news carefully to gauge what it reveals about the strategic risk of building an AI future based on someone else’s infrastructure and subject to someone else’s government.

India’s enterprise AI conversation has been dominated by a single assumption: that serious AI means access to the most powerful frontier models—GPT-4o, Gemini Ultra, Claude Fable and others. Boards often ask which model the company uses. Vendors compete on benchmarks. The implicit belief is that capability lives at the frontier, in hyperscaler clouds, or in San Francisco. That assumption is now expensive, fragile and—for Indian enterprises—flawed.