Why India cannot afford to rent its intelligence: The case for sovereign AI infrastructure
By Ankush Tiwari, Founder & CEO, pi-labs
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...
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