The author critically assesses India's reliance on foreign frontier AI models, citing the US ban on Anthropic's models as a cautionary tale. This dependence creates strategic, financial, and sovereignty risks due to high costs, regulatory fragility, and external control. The article argues that the performance gap with open-source alternatives, especially those fine-tuned for Indian languages and data like BharatGen, has diminished. India must invest in indigenous AI development, leveraging local datasets, edge inference, and context-specific solutions. Building a self-reliant AI infrastructure is crucial to avoid future dependencies and ensure a robust, controlled national AI strategy.