As criticism mounts over India's lack of a sovereign large language model (LLM), startup founder Vijay Thirumalai has come out in defence of the country's IT pioneers, arguing that blaming companies such as Infosys, TCS and Zoho for the gap is "lazy".

Thirumalai, founder of Goldwater, an AI-powered global mobility platform, was responding to a growing debate over India's AI strategy that intensified after Anthropic suspended access to some of its advanced AI models following a US government directive.

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"Blaming India's leaders like Infy, TCS, Zoho for not building an LLM is the most low IQ /lazy pushback for India not having sovereign LLMs," Thirumalai wrote in a post on Sunday.

He credited India's IT services industry with helping create the country's middle class and building confidence that Indian companies could compete globally.

"They sent millions of Indians abroad giving us valuable remittances, gave us the confidence that we can build world class service companies & whatever middle class we have is largely because of IT/ ITES companies, basically got us from 0-1," he said.

Drawing comparisons with North America, Thirumalai argued that established technology and consulting firms are not typically blamed for failing to create frontier AI companies. "No one in US blames IBM/ Accenture/ Deloitte for not building LLM/ no one in Canada blames Constellation for not building Chatgpt," he wrote.

He also criticised what he described as a tendency among Indian commentators to target successful business leaders. "Forget having gratitude, Indian Intellectuals have this unique disease of berating leaders who have delivered - Come on guys we can do better," he added.

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Rajiv Malhotra's criticism

Thirumalai's remarks came after author Rajiv Malhotra criticised Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and investor TV Mohandas Pai.

"I have argued against Nilekani, @TVMohandasPai and others for decades, on their quick buck mentality. Made millions by renting Indian brains for building US intellectual property. Their selfishness got rewarded by Indian elites and feel good masses. Now India is paying the price. China had different strategy to protect sovereignty," Malhotra said.

The debate has also revived scrutiny of India's IT services giants, particularly Infosys and TCS, which have often been criticised for focusing on services rather than investing heavily in frontier research and AI model development.

Nilekani himself had previously argued that India should focus on AI applications and use cases rather than attempting to build another foundational LLM, saying that "the big boys" in Silicon Valley could spend billions developing such models.

The discussion gained momentum after Anthropic announced that it was suspending access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models following a directive from the US government.

"The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees," the company said.

"The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance."