India, July 22 -- Companies across the world are turning to Chinese open-weight models that now deliver near-frontier capability at a fraction of the cost, trailing the frontier (Anthropic's) by roughly eight months. Even this claim is changing fast with Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 beating Anthropic's Fable 5 on some coding-related benchmarks. These developments have amplified the question of AI sovereignty for India: In the absence of a domestic frontier model, are Chinese open-source models just as problematic as US proprietary models?

Our argument is that the sovereignty debate should not treat AI as a monolith. A proprietary model reached through a foreign application programming interface (API) and an open-weight model running on Indian h...