On the evening of 12 June 2026, the most capable artificial intelligence on the planet vanished for everyone who wasn’t American. Anthropic had released Fable 5 barely three days earlier; then an export-control order arrived from Washington, and the company had little choice but to pull the model for every foreign national on earth, Indians included, overnight. Access limped back weeks later, rationed to a fraction of its normal limits. For a few days, the world watched a live demonstration of a truth India keeps preferring to ignore: intelligence you rent is intelligence someone else can switch off.
This is the quiet bargain beneath much of our AI ambition: plug into the world’s best models, pay by the token, move fast. It feels like efficiency. It is the posture of a tenant, and tenants do not set the rent, hold the keys, or decide when the locks are changed.
And India is the largest tenant of all. We are now the second-biggest market on earth for these systems: by OpenAI’s own count, we crossed 100 million weekly users in early 2026, and we make up nearly a fifth of the world’s users of leading AI apps, comfortably ahead of the United States, with the largest population of student users anywhere. We are the growth story these firms sell to their investors. Yet we reach them on discounted and giveaway tiers, handing over the data that trains their next model, and what returns to us is a sealed box: reasoning we cannot inspect, shaped by judgments made elsewhere, carrying biases we have no standing to correct. We are the fuel. We are not the engine.
None of this is confined to chatbots and homework. When U.S. Central Command opened its 2026 campaign against Iran by striking more than a thousand targets in the first hours, the system helping assess intelligence and shortlist those targets was Anthropic’s Claude, the very model sold to the rest of us as a writing assistant, as the Wall Street Journal reported and Senate testimony later confirmed. One week it is national-security infrastructure; the next it can be revoked by decree. The lesson is not subtle. The technology that decides who prevails on a battlefield is the one technology no serious nation will ever rent.
Sovereignty, to be clear, is not a plea for autarky. India need not smelt every chip or spurn every partner. The distinction that matters is between the substrate and the intelligence: lease the scaled, secure compute if you must, but own the models, the data, and the decisions taken in sensitive domains. Rent the ground; build and keep the house.
Ownership, in fact, runs deeper than software. A defence-AI firm can be headquartered in Pune and still not be sovereign if its cap table is not. When the capital behind a company building critical national capability is foreign, foreign influence rides in with it, quieter than any export ban, and far harder to reverse. Sovereign intelligence needs sovereign capital, or we move the dependency from the cloud to the boardroom.
We have done the harder version of this before. When the world assumed India would route its payments through foreign networks, we built UPI and Aadhaar instead, and kept the value at home. The same foundation is now being laid for AI: under the India AI Mission, more than 38,000 GPUs already sit on shared national compute, and a first cohort of about 20 indigenous, India-owned models is taking shape.
The work from here is to make three foundations unshakeable. Sovereign compute, the silicon and data centres on our own soil. Sovereign data, gathered and governed under Indian law. Sovereign models, built, owned, and open to our own scrutiny. Strengthen each through capability grown at home rather than licensed from abroad, and the systems that guard our borders, our agencies and our critical infrastructure will answer to India alone.
India has never accepted a tenant’s terms in anything that truly mattered: payments, identity, space, defence. It cannot afford to begin with the capability that will define this century. A nation that rents its intelligence will always think on borrowed terms, and, when tested, may be forced to fight on them too.
Authored by Ankush Tiwari, Founder & CEO, pi-labs