As debate intensifies over India’s lack of a sovereign large language model (LLM), Vijay Thirumalai, founder of AI-powered global mobility platform Goldwater, has defended the country’s IT pioneers, arguing that blaming companies like Infosys, TCS, and Zoho for the gap is both unfair and simplistic.
Responding to the growing discussion around India’s AI strategy, which gained momentum after Anthropic suspended access to some of its advanced models following a US government directive, Thirumalai said criticism aimed at India’s technology leaders misses the bigger picture.
“Blaming Infosys, TCS, or Zoho for not building sovereign LLMs is a lazy argument,” he wrote in a post on Sunday.
Thirumalai credited India’s IT services industry with laying the foundation for the country’s economic growth and helping create a large middle class. According to him, these companies gave millions of Indians global opportunities, generated valuable remittances, and proved that Indian firms could compete successfully on the world stage.
He noted that similar criticism is rarely directed at established companies in North America. “No one in the US blames IBM, Accenture, or Deloitte for not building ChatGPT, and no one in Canada blames Constellation Software for failing to create an LLM,” he argued.
The entrepreneur also expressed disappointment over what he described as a tendency among Indian intellectuals to criticize business leaders who have already delivered significant value to the country.
His comments came in response to author Rajiv Malhotra, who recently criticized Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and investor TV Mohandas Pai for prioritizing short-term gains through IT services rather than investing in intellectual property and frontier technologies.
Malhotra argued that India’s dependence on outsourcing and service-based businesses had left the country lagging in critical areas such as artificial intelligence, contrasting India’s approach with China’s strategy of protecting technological sovereignty.
The discussion has renewed scrutiny of India’s IT giants, particularly Infosys and TCS, which have long been criticized for focusing on services instead of investing heavily in cutting-edge research and AI model development.
Interestingly, Nandan Nilekani himself has previously suggested that India should focus more on building AI applications and use cases rather than competing directly in the race to develop foundational models, arguing that Silicon Valley companies have the resources to spend billions on such efforts.
The debate gained fresh urgency after Anthropic announced that it had suspended access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals following a US government export control directive.
The company said the order, issued on national security grounds, required it to immediately disable the two models for all customers to ensure compliance, while access to its other Claude models remained unaffected.
The episode has reignited conversations around technological sovereignty and whether India should accelerate efforts to develop its own frontier AI capabilities instead of relying heavily on foreign platforms.
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