India, June 15 -- 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 substitutes. But Fable 5 and Mythos 5 are, by most accounts, the most capable yet built, and the mechanism of their removal is the lesson. It was, on the available record, the first time a company disabled such a capability on the order of a government. The restriction reached only the most advanced and most expensive tier this time. The next could be narrower and sharper - an adversary nation, a particular use, a named company. Built at scale into how countries work and learn, that dependence is a strategic risk. Where these models reach intelligence and defence work, it becomes strategic in the plainest sense. India, like most of the world, does not have companies like Anthropic or OpenAI. And its sovereign answer, the IndiaAI Mission, is not built for this contest. Its entire Rs.10,372-crore budget over five years - spread across chips, datasets, skilling and subsidies - is roughly what it now costs to train a single frontier model once, upward of a billion dollars. The mission funds Indian-language models and shared computing. That is useful industrial policy. But it buys access to the technology, not the capacity to make it, and pooled compute does not close a research gap a decade in the making. What follows is not a demand for an Indian frontier model by next year; that is a fantasy. It is a demand that the mission stop mistaking procurement for capability - that it fund frontier research, and the people to do it, rather than coupons for borrowed chips. Indians helped build the frontier it now rents; the talent was never the constraint. It works, for now, for those who hold the switch....