India’s Sovereign AI Reality Check

India built its own LLMs to challenge the world. But in chasing sovereign AI, has the country lost sight of building globally competitive models?

Added to Saved Stories in Login VIEW SAVED STORIES .inc42-toggle-item-popup { display: none; position: relative; } .toggle-item-close { text-align: end; padding: 8px 12px 0px 10px; position: absolute; right: 0; cursor: pointer; } .toggle-items-content-main { display: block; position: relative; top: 27px; left: -204px; border-radius: 12px; background: #FFF; box-shadow: 0px 4px 24px 0px rgba(100, 100, 100, 0.25); width: 435px; height: 115px; } .toggle-items-content { display: flex; align-items: baseline; justify-content: center; padding-top: 22px; } .toggle-items-content .items-content-text .h4-saved-story{ color: #000; font-size: 20px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; line-height: normal; text-transform: capitalize; margin: 2px 0 10px 6px; } .toggle-items-content .items-content-text .myInc42-plus-dark { width: 100px !important; } .toggle-items-content .items-content-text .myInc42-light { width: 80px !important; } .toggle-items-content .items-content-text img{ height: 22px; } .view-my-feed-btn { width: 100%; text-align: center; display: flex; justify-content: center; } .view-my-feed-btn a { width: auto !important; } .view-my-feed-btn button { border-radius: 4px; background: linear-gradient(180deg, #DA1B4D 0%, #E23026 100%); color: #fff; font-size: 12px; display: inline-block !important; min-width: 162px; width: 162px !important; height: 34px !important; font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; line-height: normal; padding: 10px; cursor: pointer; } .CustomIconStyled { position: absolute; right: 180px; top: -80px; } .SubDropdownModelShare .sub-arrow-icon { width: 76px; height: 80px; position: relative; overflow: hidden; box-shadow: none; } @media (max-width:767px) { .toggle-items-content .items-content-text .h4-saved-story{ margin: 4px 0 10px 6px; font-size: 18px; } .toggle-items-content { align-items: center; } }

India was quick to respond to Sam Altman when he underestimated the country’s ability to build something even remotely comparable to ChatGPT during a visit in early 2023. 

But within just seven months, India had an answer of its own. Krutrim, the country’s first AI unicorn, launched a family of large language models (LLMs).

Following this, LLMs by Sarvam AI, BharatGen, CoRover.ai, Gnani.ai, Soket AI became the focal point for sovereign AI. Indian founders had started work on their own arsenal in response to the growing dominance of OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok.

Indeed, the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi this year was a culmination of this wave of sovereign AI that emerged in the aftermath of Altman’s contentious remarks.   

The grit was undeniable, and the shared ambition was clear — to build something powerful and deeply rooted in the Indian context, something global players would struggle to replicate with the same authenticity and nuance as Indian founders.

But the race to make a truly Indian LLM seems to have lost some of its steam. Just take the case of Krutrim, which launched with such fanfare but has now petered out after its efforts to build an LLM did not pan out. 

So what exactly went wrong, and can Indian AI companies disrupt the global AI industry in a major way?

Missing From The Global AI Conversation

Despite pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into sovereign AI, India is still waiting for its DeepSeek moment. When it comes to LLMs, Indian models rarely figure in the global conversation, and even those models which were launched during the India AI Impact Summit have failed to plug this gap. 

Well, for one, in the bid to build India’s own ChatGPT, the focus of many of these companies increasingly shifted towards Indian languages, and one can argue that they overlooked the challenge of building an Indian AI model that can work in the global context. 

Thus far, only DeepSeek, which is of Chinese origin, has managed to break into the conversation and be spoken of in the same breath as OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, xAI or Meta. 

Much of the ecosystem became consumed with proving that Indian models could speak Indian languages. This was indeed a strong differentiator in the........

© Inc42