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In an essay published earlier this year, Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, described a danger he called the economic concentration of power. His worry was that wealth could concentrate so severely that a small group would effectively set public policy while ordinary citizens, having lost their economic leverage, discover that the implicit bargain underpinning democracy no longer holds. He wrote that he shared the concern and suspected it had already begun.

He is right about the diagnosis. The question worth asking, particularly from Delhi rather than San Francisco, is whether the remedies now on offer treat that concentration or deepen it.

Consider what the past few months have actually produced.

In June, Anthropic released its most capable model with a layer of automated classifiers sitting in front of it. Requests touching offensive cybersecurity, biology, chemistry and certain categories of AI development are diverted to an older, weaker model. The company’s own documentation is candid: users should expect high fallback rates on security work, and the flagship is “not recommended for professional biology research and drug development at this time.” An unrestricted version exists. It is available to a small number of vetted partners.

Hold that beside the promise. The same company argues, persuasively and at length, that AI could compress decades of biomedical progress into five or ten years and cure most of what kills us. Each position is defensible on its........

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