A startup founder has come out in defence of Infosys co-founders NR Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani amid criticism over India's failure to build a home-grown large language model (LLM). 

Entrepreneur Chinmay Singh has argued that the country's bureaucracy—not its tech billionaires—is the real obstacle to India's AI ambitions.

Singh, founder of healthcare startup TeleVox Healthcare and AI firm iWish.ai, made the remarks on Sunday amid renewed scrutiny of India's AI strategy following reports that the US government had restricted access to some of Anthropic's most advanced AI models.

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"Indians are blaming Infy/Murthy/Nandan for a lack of home-grown LLM. But that blame is misplaced," Singh wrote on X. "Infy/Murthy/Nandan could never start an AI company. They had money and they could have fund something. But that again, is their money and why should they risk it?"

Instead, Singh blamed what he described as India's entrenched bureaucratic culture. "The real culprit here is Amitabh Kant and other IAS like him. These are the people, why I left India and started two companies in the US. These are the people, why much of Indian talent left to work for US based companies."

The entrepreneur said that even if the government offered him $10 billion to build an AI laboratory in India, he would refuse. "Let's say the government gives me $10B and ask me to set up an AI lab in India. Am I qualified to do it? YES. Will I do it? HELL NO," Singh said.

Explaining his position, he argued that he would not want to work under bureaucratic oversight. "The real reason is Babu... Under no circumstance, I am gonna report to a babu," he wrote, adding that he would be willing to report to elected ministers but not career bureaucrats.

He further claimed that bureaucratic structures were discouraging talented Indians living abroad from returning.

"Till this babu problem is fixed, no NRI would come to India. If I were the CIA or CCP, trying to ensure that India does not gain AI independence, I would make every effort to protect Babu fiefdom," Singh said.

His comments came in response to a growing debate over India's AI ecosystem and whether the country should focus on building foundational models or concentrate on applications powered by global AI platforms.

Responding to a social media user who questioned how bureaucracy was hindering AI development, Singh pointed to taxation policies affecting technology startups.

"Regarding how babudom interferes- look at tax a company has to pay to give engineers a MacBook instead of cheap windows device. That's a 20% tax on productivity. No startup in the US gives anything but MacBook. That's just the start."

On Saturday, there were some criticism against Nilekani, who has long argued that India should prioritise AI applications rather than spend billions competing to build frontier LLMs.

Speaking at Meta's "Build with AI" summit in Bengaluru in 2024, Nilekani had said India should not attempt to build "one more LLM" and should instead become the "use-case capital of the world."

"Our goal should not be to build one more LLM. Let the big boys in the (Silicon) Valley do it, spending billions of dollars. We will use it to create synthetic data, build small language models quickly, and train them using appropriate data," Nilekani had said.