In 1995, MIT Press published a book that nobody was meant to read in the ordinary way. It was the complete source code of Pretty Good Privacy, Phil Zimmermann’s encryption program, set in machine-readable type across some 900 pages. Washington had placed strong cryptography on the US Munitions List, alongside fighter aircraft and artillery, and exporting it without a licence was a crime. A book, however, was protected speech. You could not email the code abroad, but you could post the book, retype it and compile. The Ninth Circuit would later agree, in Bernstein, that source code was an expression. By around 2000, the controls had quietly collapsed, having mostly handicapped American firms while the mathematics spread anyway.
A generation on, the US has reached past the code to the thing the code produces.
On June 9 this year, Anthropic released two versions of its most capable model. Fable 5 came wrapped in safety classifiers; Mythos 5 was the same engine with the guardrails lifted, locked to a handful of vetted partners. Three days later, a letter arrived from the US Commerce Secretary. Both models were subjected to export controls. No foreign national could use them, whether inside the US or outside it, and that included Anthropic’s own foreign-born employees. There is no way to verify the citizenship of everyone who opens a chat window, so the company did the only thing compliance allowed. It switched both models off—worldwide, for everybody. The most capable model ever made generally available to the public had a public life of three days.
The stated trigger was a jailbreak, a method of coaxing the model into reading a codebase and pointing out its flaws. Anthropic, which reviewed the demonstration, noted that the same vulnerabilities were discoverable by other widely available models, OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 among them. Nothing was shipped. No weights crossed a border, no file changed hands. The model sat exactly where it had always sat. What the directive reached for was not a product crossing a frontier but a sentence being generated in answer to a question.
Export-control law has long recognised the ‘deemed export’. Showing controlled blueprints to a foreign engineer in your own office is treated as an export to his country. Sensible enough, when the worry is that knowledge walks out in someone’s head. But an inference is not a blueprint. To classify a remote conversation with a hosted machine as an export is to reclassify cognition itself as a controlled substance. A word, it seems, can be made to mean whatever the powerful decide it should. Whether the reading survives a court is an open question; Anthropic has already won a first round against this same administration on a related matter. The precedent, however, is now made.
For India, the relevant clause is the plainest one. The directive bars foreign nationals, and to an American model, an Indian engineer in Bengaluru, or in Sunnyvale, is a foreign national. We have spent a decade telling ourselves that the frontier was a marketplace we could simply shop in. The letter is a reminder that the shopkeeper answers to a government which is not ours, and that the shop can be shut between one over of a World Cup match and the next.
The greater difficulty is one that India’s chief economic advisor has been describing. A private sector that captures domestic demand but generates little intellectual property of its own, a consumer of others’ technology rather than a producer of it, sits under a slow, accumulating threat. Indian research and development spending has hovered below 0.7 percent of GDP for years, against China’s 2.4 percent and South Korea’s near 5 percent. When the critical technology of the century can be withdrawn by a third party at will, that gap stops being an economic statistic and becomes a question of sovereignty.
There is a temptation, audible already, to celebrate. The argument runs that sanctions are a gift, that just as the embargo after Pokhran II in 1998 forced indigenous capability in cryotechnology and supercomputing, so this will force an Indian AI into being. There is something to it. Necessity does concentrate the mind.
But it is a dangerous comfort. Compulsion is not capacity. The Calico Acts of 1700 and 1721, which banned Indian cotton to protect Lancashire, did not make Indian weavers stronger. They helped deindustrialise a subcontinent. Restriction builds capability only where the foundations are already being laid, which is to say cheap and reliable power, fast access to compute, the freedom to hire and to fire, patient capital and talent that is not forever booking a one-way ticket west. We command none of these by wishing.
What India should do is therefore unglamorous and entirely within its gift. Treat compute as infrastructure rather than as a procurement line. Make it trivial to build a data centre and connect it to the grid in weeks instead of years. Keep close to the open-weight models that no letter can recall, since a model whose weights already sit on 10,000 drives has no off-switch in Washington. And fund, without illusions about the odds, at least one serious attempt at the frontier, not to wall our own firms behind it, but so that the option simply exists.
The Americans, in fairness, have done us the courtesy of being honest early. An umbrella is a fine thing in a downpour. It is a less fine thing when it belongs to someone else, and he decides, mid-shower, that he would rather like it back.
Aditya Sinha | Public policy professional
(Views are personal)
(On X @adityasinha004)