India's AI dependence is the symptom, not the disease

India uses more AI than almost anyone and builds almost none of it. Before this live event, we surveyed 501 of our readers. In the past week, 93 percent of them had used a model from OpenAI or Anthropic. Two percent had used an Indian one. The biggest gap they named was that India has no credible model of its own. Last week I put three people who see this differently on a stage in Bangalore and we started from the question: is AI a fighter jet, or a power grid? A scarce thing you hoard, or an abundant one you let spread. Paras Chopra builds AI and runs his own lab, Lossfunk. Venugopal Garre reads the whole industry through markets, as head of India research at Bernstein. Pranay Kotasthane thinks about it the way a country's strategists have to, at Takshashila. What came out of it was that dependence is not the same as vulnerability, what your "alpha" is once models can copy everything else you do, why nobody in India has built a DeepSeek, the strange case of a sovereign model almost nobody uses, and whether India should rewrite copyright law the way it once rewrote drug patents. This is the sharp forty-five minutes of a three-hour argument. **Guests** - **Paras Chopra**, founder of Lossfunk; earlier bootstrapped Wingify. - **Venugopal Garre**, MD and head of India research, Bernstein. - **Pranay Kotasthane**, deputy director, Takshashila Institution; writes "Anticipating the Unintended." **Read and hear more** - Zero Shot: "The best time to think about Intelligence Independence was 4 years ago. The next best time is now." \[link] - Zero Shot: "Is India the subject or the object of its AI story?" \[link] - The event page and its living record of the votes: \[link] **Credits** Recorded live at the Bangalore International Centre on 1 August 2026, the sixth event in The Ken's live series. Hosted by Rohin Dharmakumar. Event co-sponsor: Neysa. Produced by The Ken. Audio by Rajiv CN.