Anthropic cuts off India — so HCLTech paid $234M to fix it

indian full-stack ai startup sarvam raised $234m led by hcltech to challenge global dominance by building local llms for vernacular languages and defense. the funding coincides with anthropic's recent restriction of model access for foreign nationals, underscoring the urgency for india's sovereign ai capabilities. sarvam currently processes 2m daily interactions and is deploying voice agents for government agriculture initiatives affecting 17m farmers. the company will focus next on agentic ai and cybersecurity models.