India, June 14 -- On Friday, on the orders of the US government, Anthropic switched off its two most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) models worldwide. The directive barred all foreign nationals from using Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on national-security grounds; the company says it gave no specific reason, but believes the concern was that the models could be jailbroken to aid cyberattacks. India, home to the second-largest base of Claude users after the US, lost access with everyone else.

To be sure, the models are not irreplaceable; Anthropic offers others, as do its rivals OpenAI and Google. Nothing collapsed on Friday. Lesser models stayed live, and the task Indians most often turn to these tools for - writing software - has ready sub...