Govt To Double Down On Indigenous AI Infra Development As US Bars Access To Anthropic’s Latest AI Models

The United States’ ban on Anthropic from sharing its latest artificial intelligence (AI) models with foreign nationals and entities has prompted the union government to think of building indigenous AI infrastructure.

According to report by The Economic Times, the government has started working on a strategy to develop AI infrastructure which is domestically controlled to minimise the impact of any future restrictions on access to frontier technologies.

The US administration has issued a export-control directive to Anthropic that forced the company to stop access of Fable 5, its latest AI model, to any foreign national.

The Centre has asked the Niti Aayog to identify the gaps in India’s AI strategy and recommend measures to plug them to move towards a self-reliant AI ecosystem.

The government wants to strengthen India’s capability to independently develop and deploy AI using its own infrastructure and workforce, the report said citing a source.

The government had launched the IndiaAI Mission in 2024. The recommendations given by Niti Aayog will be used to either expand the scope of the Mission or a new initiative could be rolled out to address the concerns highlighted by the thinktank.

The idea of IndiaAI Mission was floated by the Niti Aayog and is being implemented by the ministry of electronics and information technology. The scheme received an allocation of Rs 10,372 crore.

As of now, over 38,000 GPUs (graphic processing units) have been onboarded under the mission while 27 data and AI labs have been set up.

With the next phase of the mission, the government would look to build more localised data centres to ensure that processing operations remain within India, the report said.

According to a recent report by the Competition Commission of India, the global AI market is projected to grow to $1 trillion by 2031, from $244.22 billion in 2025. In India, it is expected to expand to $31.94 billion by 2031, from $7.84 billion in 2025.