US assures India over AI ‘kill switch’ as ‘Pax Silica’ expands in bid to counter China

The United States has assured India that future artificial intelligence models will not be “cut off” days after Washington abruptly banned Anthropic’s advanced models on national security grounds, a senior Indian official told the South China Morning Post on Thursday.

“There was an understanding, and something that they [US officials] certainly mentioned, that access to technology, once it is provided, will not be cut off. I think that was an assurance,” said S. Krishnan, secretary of India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and leader of India’s delegation for the summit.

India raised its concerns over the AI “kill switch” on the sidelines of the “Pax Silica” summit in Washington – a US-led initiative designed to build China-free AI supply chains.

“The American concern is fundamentally how these models could potentially be used, and they were looking at a review mechanism for some of this internally before they are released,” Krishnan told the SCMP.

In early June, the Trump administration issued an export control directive on national security grounds barring foreign nationals from using Anthropic’s most advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

The company subsequently cut off access to both models worldwide without any warning.