Anthropic AI row marks major shift in global tech order

In 1973, the world learned that oil could be weaponised. In 2026, we may have learned that intelligence can be nationalised.

Earlier this month, the United States government issued an export control directive requiring Anthropic to suspend all foreign access to its most advanced AI models – Fable 5 and Mythos 5 – citing national security concerns. Every customer lost access, not just foreign nationals. Anthropic complied while publicly contesting the rationale.

The significance of this moment has little to do with Anthropic, or even with the specific models involved. It has everything to do with the future of power.

For decades, nations competed for territory, resources, manufacturing capacity, energy, talent, and data. Intelligence itself was assumed to be a uniquely human capability – distributed across populations, cultivated through education, and expressed through institutions. That assumption is beginning to break.

For the first time in history, we have created systems capable of generating intelligence at scale. And once intelligence becomes a scalable resource, it inevitably becomes a strategic one.

History of Power: Every era is defined by the resource that creates leverage. Agrarian societies were built around land. Industrial societies were built around machines. The twentieth century was shaped by oil. The digital era was shaped by data. The coming era will be shaped by intelligence.

This shift is more profound than it first appears. Oil powered machines. Data powered software. But intelligence powers decision-making itself and decision-making sits at the centre of every economic, military, scientific, and governmental system.

A society with greater access to intelligence can design better products, discover medicines faster, educate citizens more efficiently, defend itself more intelligently, and innovate more rapidly. If previous centuries were defined by the production of goods, the coming century will be defined by the production of intelligence. That changes the nature of competition between nations.

Not an AI Story: Much of the current discussion focuses on model capabilities, benchmarks, safety concerns, and corporate positioning. These conversations matter. But they miss the larger story.

This is not primarily an AI story. It is a geopolitical one.

Throughout history, whenever a capability becomes strategically important, governments move to secure it. Nuclear technology followed this pattern. Advanced semiconductors followed this pattern. Cryptography, space technology, satellite navigation all followed the same arc. Artificial intelligence is beginning to follow the same trajectory.

The logic is straightforward. If advanced AI systems can accelerate scientific discovery, cybersecurity, military planning, economic productivity, and national competitiveness, then governments will increasingly view them not as products but as assets. And assets become subjects of policy. The age of AI as a purely commercial phenomenon may prove surprisingly short. The age of AI as a national capability may have already begun.

Intelligence Sovereignty: Globalisation was built on a simple assumption: knowledge should flow freely, talent should move freely, technology should spread, and markets should integrate. This assumption enabled unprecedented prosperity. But the emergence of frontier AI introduces a new tension.

What happens when intelligence itself becomes a source of strategic advantage?

Nations may increasingly conclude that unrestricted access creates vulnerabilities. The result is something we might call intelligence sovereignty just as countries seek energy security and food security, they may soon seek intelligence security. Countries will need to invest in sovereign compute infrastructure, cultivate domestic AI ecosystems, and ask a fundamental question: can our future be dependent on intelligence produced elsewhere?

The nations that fail to answer this question may find themselves in a position similar to those that lack energy independence. Dependence becomes vulnerability.

AI as Infrastructure: One of the most consequential mistakes leaders make is treating AI as software. AI is increasingly behaving like infrastructure.

Electricity transformed every industry. The internet transformed every industry. The value of roads is not roads – it is commerce. The value of electricity is not power generation – it is industrial productivity. Likewise, the value of AI is not the model itself. The value lies in what societies can build on top of it.

The countries that understand this earliest will gain a significant advantage. Not those with the most advanced models, but those that integrate intelligence most effectively into education, healthcare, governance, and workforce development.

India’s Opportunity: Much of the global conversation assumes the future AI race will be dominated by the United States and China. That assumption may be incomplete. History rarely rewards imitation. The nations that matter most are often those that create new models rather than copying existing ones.

India’s opportunity is not to become another Silicon Valley. It is to become something the world has never seen: the world’s largest AI-enabled democracy.

India possesses advantages that are frequently underestimated. It has one of the largest youth populations in human history. It has extraordinary software engineering talent. It has demonstrated the power of digital public infrastructure through Aadhaar, UPI, and the broader India Stack. It operates at a scale few nations can match, and scale changes everything. Problems that appear local in India often become global solutions.

The more important question is not who will build the most powerful model, but who will build the most AI-capable society. Creating a frontier model is an extraordinary achievement. Creating a society where hundreds of millions of people effectively collaborate with AI may be even more transformative.

The Purpose of Intelligence: The deepest question is not technological. It is human.

For centuries, societies have struggled with unequal access to education, expertise, mentorship, and opportunity. Artificial intelligence has the potential to alter this equation. For the first time in history, expertise can be distributed at scale. The challenge is to ensure that this capability expands human agency rather than concentrates power.

The most successful societies of the coming decades will not be those that simply automate more tasks. They will be those that empower more people. The purpose of AI should not be replacing human potential. It should be amplifying it.

Ten years from now, historians may look back on the Fable 5 directive not because a government restricted access to a model, but because the world began recognising intelligence as a strategic asset – one as consequential as oil, as foundational as electricity. The nations that understand this shift earliest will help define the century that follows.

Deepu S Nath is a serial entrepreneur who heads the Indian operations of the US-based Faya and is the driving force behind the student peer-learning group MuLearn. A  version of this essay was first published on Medium

Open Door for AI Washing

Not a name that would come to mind when you think of famous IT companies, but nevertheless, the US-based Opendoor was in the news cycle last week after the company said it was closing down its Indian operations. It said it was laying off around 250 employees in India and cited increased utilisation of AI as a reason for the move. This set off a flurry of stories on how AI is stealing jobs and how GCCs are hurting Indian IT services companies. Predictable comments from some experts and analysts kept the news going for a day or two, reviving the “AI-is-coming-for-your-job” loop once again.

But what we liked was a flag raised by entrepreneur-cum-investor Robin Panicker on the whole affair. He dug a bit into the company's past performance and posted on LinkedIn that Opendoor's performance in the last financial year was nothing to write home about. As he points out, the company's revenues were shrinking and its losses were widening. “When a company faces crashing share prices and widening losses, AI becomes a very convenient wrapper for painful downsizing,” says his LinkedIn post. We guess investors look beyond the headlines, unlike some ‘experts’ who get quoted in the media regularly.

AI tracks World Cup managers

Football has been the topic of discussion everywhere, and there has been no shortage of stories on how technology is being used at this edition of the tournament. But what caught our eye was the xC Tracker released by Stockholm-based Sinch AB. The AI-powered tool analyses every pre- and post-match press conference delivered by the tournament's 48 national team managers, tracking how often they resort to stock phrases such as “We will take one game at a time” instead of offering genuine insight. Rankings are updated throughout the competition, showing how managers’ cliché scores rise and fall after wins and defeats. Is it just us, or would a similar tracker for our elected and non-elected officials be worth having?

The millionaires of SpaceX

If you were not following football news (or soccer, if you are in the US), then Elon Musk and SpaceX's much-discussed stock market debut must have flooded your timelines. There were plenty of bouquets and brickbats in the news cycle and on social media, but one number caught our eye: the employees who struck gold. SpaceX has around 22,000 employees, with thousands more having passed through its ranks over the years. According to The New York Times, a San Francisco-based investment platform,estimated that more than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees would become millionaires from the listing. Of those, around 400 were to end up with more than 100 million US dollars. The report also cites former employees who traded away their shares for perks such as restaurant coupons, assuming the company would never go public. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.

Love in the times of AI

True love triumphs, even when the intelligence is artificial. Jian Tao started building what would become the popular Chinese AI music platform Initiai.on for a simple reason: he wanted to write a song for his wife. The speech-recognition veteran had never studied music, but his romantic side project eventually grew into a successful platform used by thousands. Tao says the real takeaway is that AI can help ordinary people unlock their creative side. We learned something else: behind many great innovations is someone trying to impress their spouse.