When the US imposed strict controls on the export of advanced GPUs, the computing backbone of AI, to China in 2022, then-NSA Jake Sullivan declared that the intention was to build a ‘small yard with a high fence’. The state would guard a few critical technologies jealously. But beyond that narrow enclosure, the free commerce of the world would continue undisturbed.
US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick’s order last week directing Anthropic to deny its latest Fable 5 model (and Mythos 5) to all non-citizens — including engineers who built it — marks a dramatic enlargement of that yard. Should the directive hold in all its severity, the fences will become iron walls. The decision lays bare three developments that will survive any potential reversal: uState, the supreme actorVarious competing ideologies, including those evangelising ‘long-termism’ and ‘effective altruism’, seem to believe that the mild-mannered, soft-spoken, bespectacled lot in Silicon Valley — not the gruff general or clueless politician — should be entrusted with the fate of the world. Over the course of this year, this notion has been mugged by reality.
When in February, Anthropic declined Pentagon’s demands to strip safety safeguards from its Claude AI model to be used for any ‘lawful use’ by the government, it cited red lines on domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. Accordingly, the company was struck from the list of approved government contractors, and branded a supply-chain risk.
While this regime can rarely be accused of acting with proper purpose, it can hardly be blamed for being peeved at the company. Last week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI will become the ‘dominant source of military and economic power’. But a firm can’t declare its tech to be the decisive instrument of national survival, deny it to its own nation’s defence services, and then be surprised at the state’s hostility towards it. This tension between universalist aspirations of technologists and realities of a hard-power world dominated by states will have to be confronted honestly by all countries, including India. In every previous generation of technological change, big tech has adjusted to needs of the US state. There is no reason to believe this time will be different.
v Resurrection of US hard power The organising myth of the post-Cold War era was that US ideas and ideals would simply spread openly and peacefully around the world through the internet. What this ignores is how the Cold War itself was waged, and won.
The US successfully banded together in a coordinating committee (CoCom) with its allies in Western Europe, Britain and Japan to successfully deny the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries access to the technologies that would dominate the computing revolution: microelectronics and telecommunications. This preserved the West’s qualitative ‘lead time’ in the arms race. The US and its allies forewent immediate profits in pursuit
of a grander strategic pursuit.
It appears that the Trump regime today is willing to do the same. India will have to adapt to a world where money will no longer be enough to buy critical technologies. w Weaponised interdependence The idea of weaponised interdependencedeveloped by political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman posits that the power seated at the central node of a network — finance, information, and now computation — can chokeoff all who depend upon it. The latest Fable 5 order is that choke point made manifest. To raise an economy and armed forces upon AI models that temperamental foreign officials may switch off at will is extremely imprudent.
India has shown before that it can punch above its weight in the contest for strategic technology through coordinated national effort. Cut off from all assistance in the wake of the first Pokhran test in 1974, India’s atomic scientists managed to build an entirely domestic nuclear ecosystem. Isro and UIDAI also stand as testaments to what can be achieved through coordinated effort.
This latest development in the US simply drives home the fact that it’s past time to kick IndiaAI Mission into high gear, with an empowered governance structure and frontier-AI sovereignty as the explicitly stated goal.
