Amid Claude Mythos and Fable 5 pause, Infosys co-founder backs argument on why India hasn't built a ChatGPT

Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan backed an X post arguing that Indian IT firms are not built to chase frontier AI models like OpenAI. The exchange has revived a wider debate over whether India should prioritise homegrown models or lean on its strengths in services and enterprise technology.

In Short

• Infosys co-founder backs viral argument on why India lacks ChatGPT rivals
• Viral post says Indian IT was never designed for frontier AI races
• Debate continues over India's AI ambitions, jobs and innovation strategy

The debate around India's AI ambitions intensified this week after AI startup Anthropic abruptly blocked access to its most advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for foreign nationals following an export-control directive from US authorities on national security grounds. Amid this backdrop, an X user named Piramal, who describes himself as someone working on developing payment agents for the emerging machine economy, argued that India's IT giants such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL have not failed in the current generative AI race. According to him, blaming Indian IT for not building a ChatGPT competitor is "not just unfair" but reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what these companies are designed to do.

His views received an endorsement from Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, who shared the post and wrote, "Thanks for the right perspective."

Why Piramal thinks Indian IT cannot play the OpenAI game

In his post, Piramal laid out four reasons why expecting Indian IT companies to behave like Silicon Valley AI firms is a mistake.

His first argument was that building frontier AI models is no longer just a software challenge; it has become an expensive infrastructure race backed by governments and technology giants. Companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic can spend billions of dollars on computing power because they are supported by deep-pocketed partners like Microsoft and Amazon.

Indian IT firms, on the other hand, operate under a different business model. Being publicly traded and focused on steady profits, they are accountable to shareholders and cannot easily make huge, risky investments with uncertain returns. As a result, while Indian IT companies excel at generating cash flow and employment, they are structurally less suited to fund the massive spending required to build frontier AI models that compete with the world's leading systems.

"If an Indian IT CEO announced tomorrow that they were cutting shareholder dividends by 80 per cent to buy 50,000 Nvidia H100 chips to build a speculative Indic LLM, the stock would crash 30 per cent by noon. Their corporate structure is legally optimized for steady margins, not venture-capital roulette," he wrote.

Indian IT's bigger role in the economy

Piramal's second argument is that Indian IT plays a much bigger role than simply building software.

According to him, the sector is a key pillar of India's economy, bringing in more than $200 billion in foreign currency every year through service exports. These dollar inflows help stabilise the rupee, strengthen foreign exchange reserves and support the country's ability to manage imports, inflation and broader economic challenges.

"The Indian IT sector brings in over $200B+ in foreign currency annually. This massive influx of US Dollars is the primary anchor that stabilizes the Rupee, builds India's foreign exchange reserves & gives the RBI the geopolitical leverage to purchase Russian oil/navigate global inflation," he wrote.

While one can argue that these companies bring valuable foreign currency into India, the latest Economic Survey notes that exports remain one of the most reliable ways to achieve sustained foreign exchange gains. But for that to happen on a larger scale, India also needs products and technologies that people around the world are willing to buy. However, it also points out that India's improvement in the World Intellectual Property Organisation's Global Innovation Index over the past decade has been slower than that of several peer economies, including China, particularly in high-technology manufacturing and private R&D expenditure.

The employment argument

In his third point, Piramal argues that Indian IT's biggest contribution is employment generation.

He says the sector directly employs more than 5 million people and indirectly supports millions more across industries such as real estate, hospitality, transport and retail. According to him, Indian IT has helped create and expand the country's middle class, especially in smaller cities.

"It is the single largest escalator that took the Indian middle class from tier-2 & tier-3 towns & gave them global purchasing power," he wrote.

Piramal argues that instead of aggressively pursuing automation that could eliminate jobs, the industry is focused on gradually upskilling its workforce and helping employees transition into AI-related roles while preserving employment opportunities.

This argument, however, remains open to debate. AI experts and industry leaders are themselves divided on whether automation will eventually lead to widespread job losses or create entirely new categories of work. So far, there is no clear evidence of large-scale job losses caused by AI.

AI's biggest opportunity may not be building models

In his fourth and final point, Piramal argues that the biggest opportunity in AI is not necessarily building foundational models but helping companies deploy them safely and effectively.

He says Indian IT firms excel at integrating complex technologies into businesses and are well-positioned to create customised AI solutions, fine-tune models using private data and manage large-scale enterprise deployments.

"When the hype settles, the companies that make the most consistent money are not the ones selling the raw steel (the LLM makers); it's the construction crews building the actual skyscrapers (the IT service integrators)," he wrote.

According to Piramal, building frontier AI models is a task better suited to governments, research institutions and venture-backed startups, while Indian IT has already played a crucial role in strengthening the economy, generating jobs and building a large middle class.

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