Another week, another billionaire in a crisp button-down telling India how to run its house.

This time it’s Dario Amodei. The Anthropic CEO recently took to the stage to suggest that India—a country where you still need three photocopies of your ID to get a SIM card in some places—should pivot its entire governance structure toward AI. He wants it to be "citizen-centric." He wants it to be "efficient." He wants Claude, or something like it, to sit between the state and its 1.4 billion people.

It’s a seductive pitch. Silicon Valley loves a blank canvas, and they’ve decided India is the biggest one left. The narrative is always the same: skip the messy middle steps of development and jump straight into the warm, fuzzy embrace of a Large Language Model. But let's be real. Amodei isn’t just offering a helping hand; he’s pitching a subscription service to the world’s most populous democracy.

The logic is simple enough on paper. India’s bureaucracy is a sprawling, multi-layered beast that has survived the British Raj, the license raj, and the digital revolution. Why not just automate the friction? Instead of a surly clerk at a district office, you get a chatbot. Instead of waiting six months for a land title verification, you get an algorithm that processes it in seconds.

It sounds great until you look at the price tag. Not just the literal cost—though India’s $1.25 billion "AI Mission" budget looks like pocket change compared to the $100 billion compute clusters Microsoft is building—but the structural cost.

To make governance "citizen-centric" through AI, you have to digitize the citizens first. You have to feed the beast. This is the specific friction no one likes to talk about in keynote speeches. For Anthropic’s vision to work, the Indian state needs to become a data-harvesting machine. Every subsidy, every ration card, every medical record needs to be ingested by a model that, for now, mostly runs on proprietary chips designed in Santa Clara and managed by companies in San Francisco.

There’s a weird irony here. India has spent the last decade shouting about "data sovereignty." They want their data kept at home. They want their own "sovereign AI." Then Amodei rolls in and reminds everyone that while you can own the data, you’re still renting the brains. If the Indian government plugs Claude into its public service pipeline, it isn't just making things efficient. It’s creating a dependency on a black box that might decide, after a safety update, that it no longer feels like explaining tax law to a farmer in Bihar.

And what happens when the "citizen-centric" AI hallucinates? If a human clerk denies your pension, you can at least yell at them. You can appeal to their supervisor. You can sit in protest outside the office. When an LLM decides your eligibility doesn't meet the probabilistic threshold for a government grant, who do you argue with? A "Help" button that generates a polite, non-committal apology?

The tech press loves to focus on the "efficiency" part of the equation. We talk about tokens per second and latency. We don’t talk about the fact that "efficient" is often just a corporate synonym for "impersonal." In a country as linguistically and culturally fragmented as India, the idea that a single model can bridge the gap between a central government and its people is a massive gamble. We’re talking about a place with 22 official languages and thousands of dialects. Good luck getting an AI trained on Reddit and Wikipedia to understand the specific nuance of a water dispute in a village outside Nagpur.

Amodei’s visit is part of the broader "Great AI Land Grab." Every major player is currently scouting for massive datasets to justify their multi-billion-dollar valuations. India is the ultimate prize. It’s a goldmine of human interaction, legal complexity, and administrative data. If Anthropic can convince the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology that Claude is the key to a frictionless future, they’ve secured a market that makes the US enterprise sector look like a lemonade stand.

But we’ve seen this movie before. We were told social media would democratize the world; it just gave us hyper-polarized echo chambers and algorithmic burnout. Now, we’re being told that AI will fix the "clunky" nature of the state. It’s the same Silicon Valley savior complex, just with better branding and a more expensive API.

The Indian government seems eager to buy in. They’re tired of being told they’re behind. They want the shiny toy. But you have to wonder if they’ve considered what happens when the "citizen-centric" interface becomes more important than the citizens themselves.

If the goal is to make the government work better for people, maybe we don't need a trillion-parameter model. Maybe we just need more people answering the phones. But there’s no venture capital in that, is there?

If a machine makes a mistake that ruins a life, does the efficiency still count as a win?