Companies across the world are turning to Chinese open-weight models that now deliver near-frontier capability at a fraction of the cost, trailing the frontier (Anthropic’s) by roughly eight months. Even this claim is changing fast with Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 beating Anthropic’s Fable 5 on some coding-related benchmarks. These developments have amplified the question of AI sovereignty for India: In the absence of a domestic frontier model, are Chinese open-source models just as problematic as US proprietary models?Not all foreign models create the same kind of dependency, and the cheaper, most accessible models might be the most sovereign. (AFP)Our argument…