Strategic autonomy: Why India should call off the LLM debate and develop its very own AI models

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), should India create its own large language models (LLMs) that can work on a trillion-plus parameters? Scale-wise, this would put them in contention with LLMs created by US players OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta and their Chinese rivals Alibaba, DeepSeek and Moonshot, with ByteDance, Tencent and Zhipu AI not far behind. Or should India focus on creating AI tools and agents based on available models? Eminent leaders of India’s success in IT services have argued in favour of the latter option. Scarce resources need not go into building frontier models from scratch, they say, as we could gain more by using what already exists to go further.

This might seem to make economic sense; why reinvent the AI wheel? The rising use of AI for strategic purposes, however, has shifted the calculus. Today, AI is not just a force multiplier on the battlefield, it can be wielded for blackmail. At war, advanced AI models can identify targets for attack; at peace, cyber-security models can exploit gaps to wreak havoc on digital systems.

Globally, a loud alarm has been rung by the restricted release of Anthropic’s Mythos, a cyber gap-spotting model claimed to be so powerful that institutional systems could come apart if it falls into rogue hands. To ensure that this high-end scanner is only used for fixing vulnerabilities, Anthropic has reportedly granted access to just over 40 trusted entities, most of which are based in the US. If the hype around Mythos is true, then India finds itself locked out of an important cyber-safety league.

That is just one example of tech deprivation. There are others too. In all, India’s strategic autonomy demands that homegrown LLMs