After Anthropic curbs, US reassures India on tech access

WEeks after booker taliaferro washington ordered anthropical to draw its to the highest degree innovative AI models offline worldwide, the US assured India that technology access, once granted, will not be abruptly withdrawn — a commitment India’s IT secretary S Krishnan said came from US officials during talks with India.Krishnan, speaking to reporters after a bilateral meeting with US under secretary of state for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg on Wednesday, said Washington had sought to explain the thinking behind its decision to suspend Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models globally, while separately committing that access already extended to trusted partners would hold.“On the AI models, the American concern is fundamentally how these models could potentially be used, how powerful they are and what could be the potential impact. They were looking at a review mechanism for some of this internally before they are released. But I think there was an understanding — and something they certainly mentioned — that access to technology, once it is provided, will not be cut off. That was an assurance,” Krishnan said, adding that India would have to wait and see how things played out in practice.The exchange carries weight for India. Anthropic had expanded its restricted Project Glasswing programme to India in early June, giving Indian organisations access to the Mythos Preview model for cybersecurity testing — among the earliest tranche of countries to receive it. Days later, Washington’s export control directive forced Anthropic to disable both Mythos 5 and the public-facing Fable 5 for every user worldwide, India included, after the government said it had learned of a possible “jailbreak” of the model.Anthropic quickly complied with the US government order, saying it could not reliably separate foreign nationals from other users to comply with the order any other way.Helberg, for his part, was measured in public, saying only that the two governments would keep talking. “These are very sensitive national security discussions that are not quite right for public consumption. But I think both sides really understand each other’s perspectives, our intention is very much to continue a gradual measured approach to how we release Anthropic’s models in a way that is safe, both for ourselves but also for our Indian counterparts as well as all our trusted partners for our critical infrastructure, for our power grid and so we are going to continue making sure that we do the hard work in having those conversations,” he told reporters on the sidelines of the summit.The Krishnan-Helberg exchange unfolded against the backdrop of the second Pax Silica summit, a US-led initiative launched in December to align allies and partners on semiconductors, critical minerals and AI supply chains — explicitly conceived, in Washington’s own language, as a counterweight to China’s dominance of those same supply chains.India signed on to the framework in February, on the sidelines of the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, and Krishnan is representing the country at this week’s gathering, with sessions on AI infrastructure, security and critical minerals.Washington used the summit to expand the bloc further, announcing nine new signatories on Wednesday: Argentina, Germany, the Netherlands, Chile, Costa Rica, Panama, Greece, Kazakhstan and the European Union. India, according to the State Department, is among 17 countries listed as a signatory to the Pax Silica declaration.In the summit’s opening ceremony, US deputy secretary of state Christopher Landau said future technologies were too important to be “left vulnerable to coercive policies and markets” — a reference, without naming China directly, to Beijing’s role in critical mineral and semiconductor supply chains.Landau said he was confident no “state directed rival” could keep pace with the private sectors of the United States and its partners. “Our combined capabilities are something no command economy can match alone,” he said.