NBA The Run

Developer and publisher: Play by Play Studios
Platforms: Steam, PS5, Xbox Series X/S
Price: $30

Basketball fever has taken hold for many as the New York Knicks are just one game away from their first NBA title since 1973. If you’re a Knicks (or San Antonio Spurs) fan looking for a way to kill some time until tonight’s Game 5, NBA The Run might have you covered.

This is a 3v3 streetball game and a spiritual successor to NBA The Street from a team including some developers who worked on that series. It features more than 30 real NBA players — including LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Luka Dončić and Kevin Durant — and it leans more into arcade action rather than taking the simulated approach of the NBA 2K series. I’m not quite as into basketball as I was as a kid, but NBA Jam has a permanent place in my heart, so I’m definitely interested in trying NBA The Run.

Solarpunk

Developer: Cyberwave
Publisher: Rokaplay
Platforms: Steam, Epic Games Store, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2

Price: $23 (available on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass)

Solarpunk is a game I’ve had on my radar for a little while. It’s a relaxing crafting game set on a group of floating islands that you can travel between using airships. The two-person team at Cyberwave have baked in some “light survival mechanics,” though this is said to be an uplifting game that you can play with friends.

Given the title, it may not be too surprising that sustainability is a key focus of Solarpunk. You’ll build devices that can draw power from renewable energy sources and use that to automate systems across your farm and home.

It looks lovely, and lots of other folks are interested in this one. Solarpunk saw more than 500,000 demo downloads during a previous edition of Steam Next Fest. More than a million people wishlisted it too.

Crushed in Time

Developer and publisher: Draw Me A Pixel
Platform: Steam (coming to Switch and mobile later this year)
Price: Usually $25, with a 20 percent discount until June 24

As a fan of LucasArts point-and-click adventures, Crushed in Time is a game that speaks to my soul. This is a spin-off from There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension. Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson make their return as they travel through time and space in search of a character that has gone missing from their own video game. You’ll be exploring the game’s development pipeline to track down this missing NPC.

Aside from the highly meta concept, what helps Crushed in Time stand out is that it takes place in an elastic universe. You’ll be tugging on objects and environments to help you solve puzzles (so it’s really more of a click-and-drag game). This looks very much up my alley. Ironically, I haven’t had time to jump in yet, but I plan on playing Crushed in Time as soon as my schedule lets up.

Voidling Bound

Developer and publisher: Hatchery Games
Platforms: Steam, Epic Games Store (coming to consoles later)
Price: $25, with a 10 percent discount until June 23

Voidling Bound is from a studio that includes former Skylanders developers, so maybe it’s not too much of a shock that this is a creature feature. It’s fundamentally a creature taming game in which you’ll breed, nurture and evolve critters using skill trees and the like.

You’ll then take control of said creatures in combat as this is also a third-person shooter. It looks like an interesting spin on the creature taming format.

33 Immortals

Developer: Thunder Lotus
Publishers: Thunder Lotus, Kepler Ghost
Platforms: Steam (previously on Xbox Series X/S and Epic Games Store)

Price: $10 until June 17 on Steam. It’s also on sale on Epic Games Store and Xbox. It’s available on Game Pass Ultimate and Premium, as well as PC Game Pass

33 Immortals is a neat game that I’m looking forward to diving back into. I played a chunk of it in early access and now Thunder Lotus has released the full version, which is also making its debut on Steam.

33 Immortals 1.0 features three playable worlds, other fresh content, more customization options and a new final boss encounter to properly conclude a run. It’s a co-op action roguelite that brings 33 players together to battle hordes of enemies and hulking bosses. There are miniboss rooms that you can conquer with a few of your teammates (after you call for help with emotes) and earn upgrades for the crew. It’s a good time!

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Energy in one’s step
Answer: PEP

4A clue: S, for a tee
Answer: SMALL

6A clue: Philosophical idea of “What goes around comes back around”
Answer: KARMA

7A clue: “Oh, you wanna go! Let’s go!”
Answer: ITSON

8A clue: What do Alexander the Great and Winnie the Pooh have in common?
Answer: THE

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Break down grammatically
Answer: PARSE

2D clue: Favorite Muppet of little kids
Answer: ELMO

3D clue: Blueprint
Answer: PLAN

4D clue: Short comedic sketch
Answer: SKIT

5D clue: 70-minute section of the SAT
Answer: MATH

SOFTWARE

Plus, Raspberry Pi edition finally catches up

MX Linux 25.2 is here, now with kernel 7.0 if you choose – although the Raspberry Pi edition still needs some work.

MX Linux has been quietly turning into one of the Reg FOSS desk’s favorite distros for a few years now. It has a number of desirable attributes, and with version 25.2 released late last month, some of the slightly bumpier parts of the major upgrade to version 25 are getting smoothed out.

We looked at MX Linux 25 in November last year, and reported that one of the niftiest features in previous versions had been lost. In MX 23 and before, you could choose which init system the OS used every time it booted up: so, for instance, you could normally run with the classic sysvinit, but if you needed to install something which demanded systemd, you could temporarily boot up with systemd as the init, install your app, and then switch back. In our testing, we’ve found that some things require Agent P’s Swiss Army Knife of a “System and Service Manager” to install, but once they’re in place on your computer, they will run quite happily without it. Alternatively, if it’s something you only occasionally run, you can start up with systemd only when you need it.

The way that MX Linux did this no longer works on kernel 6.12 or above. So, in order to continue to offer a choice of inits at all, MX 25.0 made you choose at install time: either pick the systemd version, or the sysvinit version. (And if you wanted KDE Plasma, it was only available in systemd form.)

MX Linux 25.1 fixed that with a new, different, switchable-init system. However, that made upgrading from 23 to 25 tricky, and after we tried it, the OS still worked, but the handy suite of MX Tools didn’t. These aren’t essential, but they significantly facilitate common adjustments and tweaks such as installing extra external apps, switching repositories and mirrors, managing kernel versions, installing additional device drivers such as the eternally problematic Nvidia drivers, and much more. They’re one of the distro’s key advantages, and well worth having.

We dug out the machine in our test fleet, which runs MX, and tried the option in the installation program that installs over the top of an existing copy of MX. It worked fine, with some caveats: it’s not quite as capable as Ubuntu’s in-place reinstall, which spares your home directory while reinstalling the OS around it. MX simply overwrites the old OS; it doesn’t pick up any config from it – but it’s quicker and easier than custom partitioning. We had to re-enable our swap partition, and add a user account that matched the old one, but everything worked fine.

With the MX Tools, it was fast and easy to choose local repositories for updates, and reinstall some handy proprietary apps such as Google Chrome and Slack. The distro comes with Flatpak preinstalled, and we used that to install Gear Lever to make it easier to reinstall Panwriter.

The new MX Linux version 25.2 optionally includes the new kernel 7.0, from the Liquorix project that we looked at in 2022. For the Xfce edition, you can choose the normal edition, with a Debian kernel, or the AHS edition with the newer kernel. The KDE edition only comes in AHS form, and the lightweight Fluxbox edition for low-end kit only offers the Debian kernel.

There are any number of Debian and Ubuntu based remixes and meta-distributions out there, but MX Linux is perhaps the single most user-friendly distro we’ve seen that isn’t based on systemd. It’s fast, lightweight, and much easier to get configured and installed than Devuan, or even than Debian itself. It also has better tools for adjustment and customization than any member of the Ubuntu or Debian family, and rivals the best Arch Linux-based distros such as Garuda Linux.

As we reported from the Ubuntu Summit, Canonical is beginning a push into AI. Since then, the roadmap for Ubuntu 26.10 “Stonking Stingray” has been published, including what it calls a Context-aware desktop – powered by LLMs. Similar changes have already come to Linux Lite 8.0, which is based on Ubuntu 26.04. This too bundles a local LLM for all your error-filled artificial-plagiarism needs.

We suspect that such developments may yet drive a small exodus of Ubuntu users – and if you also want to get away from systemd at the same time, then MX Linux is an excellent place to start.

Bootnote: MX Linux on the Raspberry Pi

Finally, version 25.2 sees the Raspberry Pi respin updated to the new base OS. Until 25.2, the Pi version was still on MX version 22. As this rather outdated description says, this is a separate edition of MX Linux with Xfce, but built in part from the packages in the Raspberry Pi OS rather than directly from Debian – so it looks and works like MX, but is compatible with most Pis and most apps for PiOS. For instance, the Pi configuration commands, and EEPROM updater, work fine on MX on the Pi, but they don’t on (for instance) Alpine Linux.

We tried MX Linux 24.2 for the Raspberry Pi on both 4 GB and 8 GB Pi 5 machines and on a Pi 4, but it wouldn’t get past the splash screen for us – but the previous release worked very well, so once it’s received a little more TLC, this could turn out to be a good option for Pi users wanting a more configurable desktop OS. ®

A former  IT employee at an Iowa school district was sentenced to 21 months in prison for conducting a prolonged cyberattack against the former employer that disrupted classroom operations, deleted accounts, and caused tens of thousands of dollars in damages.

According to court documents, Ezekiel Dean Potter, 34, previously worked as a senior IT support specialist for the Saydel Community School District in Des Moines from May 2022 through April 2023. 

Prosecutors say that after his employment ended, Potter retained access credentials and repeatedly targeted the district’s systems over the next 21 months.

“For over a year and a half, Defendant was a plague on the Saydel Community School District,” the U.S. government said in a sentencing memorandum.

“He deleted SCSD’s Facebook page, stripped its employees of access to educational platforms and accounts, and tried again and again to reset its employees’ usernames and passwords for various other platforms and accounts.”

Prosecutors said the attacks caused widespread disruption to the school district, impaired its ability to teach students, and resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in remediation costs.

Court documents state the attacks began shortly after Potter left the district, when Saydel’s Facebook account was deleted.

Prosecutors say Potter later targeted the district’s Apple School Manager account, deleting user accounts, passwords, phone numbers, billing information, and device management server data.

This effectively prevented school employees from accessing the Apple School Manager platform and disabled management of district MacBooks and iPads for roughly a week while staff worked with Apple to recover access.

The district also experienced unauthorized access attempts against its GoDaddy account and other online services.

Court documents go on to say that in January 2025, Potter accessed the district’s Schoology learning management system through a Google administrator account and deleted an IT employee’s account, disrupting teacher access to the platform and impacting classes for approximately two hours.

A week later, prosecutors say Potter accessed another administrator account and deleted nine Gmail accounts belonging to current and former district employees, including the district’s IT director and superintendent.

Court filings state that Potter later switched to using a VPN service after receiving Google security alerts warning of unauthorized account access.

Federal investigators eventually traced some of the activity to IP addresses associated with Potter’s other employers, including Casey’s Store Support Center and The Printer Inc. (TPI).

After Potter left TPI in January 2025, prosecutors say he asked a former coworker to retrieve and wipe a USB drive from his desk.

Instead, the coworker turned it over to investigators, who allegedly found spreadsheets containing usernames and passwords for Saydel School District accounts and services.

Potter pleaded guilty in January 2026 to computer fraud charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act without entering into a plea agreement.

On June 11, Potter was sentenced to 21 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release.

As part of his supervised release conditions, Potter will be subject to restrictions and monitoring related to employment, finances, and computer systems, including searches of electronic devices upon reasonable suspicion.

Potter is also required to pay $59,668.81 in restitution to the Saydel Community School District and its insurer, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company, for remediation costs related to the attacks.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.

Advertisement

Get the whitepaper

offbeat

A blast from the past greets commuters

BORK!BORK!BORK! We’re big fans of retro computing here at Vulture Central, and so it is with a certain delight that we can report XP-era Windows has been spotted disgracing itself on London’s Docklands Light Railway.

Spotted by Register reader Tim Hayward, the wonderfully named DaisySignApp.exe has thrown up an application error. While the Windows shell might be shorn of all of XP’s fripperies, the Recycle Bin icon hints at the operating system’s origins. Hayward reckoned that XP was stalking the DLR, but it could also be Windows Server 2003.

Support for Windows Server 2003 finally ended in 2015. XP was sunset in 2014, so the DLR display is rather out of date. Then again, as any IT administrator would admit, if something isn’t broken, there’s no point fixing it, no matter how much Microsoft would encourage them to.

In this case, it is unlikely that the operating system is at fault (although one could argue that it should handle a misbehaving application more discreetly), and DaisySignApp.exe should be dealing with its own dirty laundry rather than throwing an exception in commuters’ faces at Limehouse station.

Limehouse connects London’s Docklands Light Railway (DLR) to the UK’s National Rail services. It was one of the first DLR stations and predates the borked operating system by more than a decade.

Indeed, at the time of the DLR’s opening in 1987, Microsoft was preparing to inflict Windows 2.0 upon the world – the delights of later versions and the company’s GUI dominance were still a few years in the future.

The DLR also seemed like a glimpse into the future back in the 1980s. However, a fair chunk of its underpinnings, such as formerly disused railway viaducts, hark back to an earlier era.

Anyone looking at today’s iteration of Windows might wonder how much of it dates back to what’s on display at Limehouse. ®

A coalition of state attorneys general has opened an investigation into OpenAI.

The company was served with a subpoena from New York’s attorney general on Friday, according to The Wall Street Journal. That subpoena sought documents related to a broad range of topics including the company’s advertising, user engagement and retention, model sycophancy, handling of consumer data and health data, and treatment of minors and seniors.

“AI is a new and powerful technology, and we work every day to safely bring its benefits to people in a responsible way,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. “We take the concerns raised by state attorneys general seriously and intend to engage constructively with their offices.”

The spokesperson also said, “Today’s ChatGPT includes a more protective experience for minors and people experiencing difficult situations, with safeguards that direct them to real-world resources and trusted human contacts. We believe kids should be treated like kids, which is why we built age prediction, released parental tools to guide their children’s use of AI, and disallowed advertising that targets kids.”

The company did not specify which states are involved in the investigation or share more details about what information was requested. TechCrunch has also reached out to New York attorney general’s office for confirmation.

OpenAI recently defeated its co-founder Elon Musk in a high-profile trial, after Musk accused the company of violating its founding agreement. (Musk’s lead attorney said he will appeal the decision.)

However, OpenAI still faces lawsuits over everything from alleged copyright infringement to ChatGPT’s alleged role in user suicides. Earlier this month, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, claiming that OpenAI and Altman “ignored internal and external safety warnings, put children at great risk, and allowed a dangerous product to reach millions of Floridians.”

Altman recently apologized to the community of Tumbler Ridge, Canada after a mass shooting; he acknowledged that OpenAI failed to alert law enforcement after the company flagged and banned the suspected shooter’s ChatGPT account.

The company announced this week that it has filed confidentially to go public.

This post has been updated with a statement from an OpenAI spokesperson.

On a recent evening in suburban Chicago, a group of parents, teachers and administrators gathered to talk about something that, until recently, rarely drew this level of public scrutiny: the role of technology in their schools.

The meeting was part of a three-session tech and learning focus group organized by Mary Jane (MJ) Warden, chief technology officer of Community Consolidated School District 15, in conjunction with the Teaching, Learning and Assessments Department.

The district, which serves 11,000 preK-8 students, spent the past several years — like so many others — adding digital tools. Now, with budgets tightening and concerns about screen time rising, it was time to take stock.

A re-examination of digital tools was already happening with curriculum reviews and tightening budgets after the pandemic. And then the screen time concerns arose.

Participants discussed everything from screen time to what district technology use looks like at home. Out of those conversations came something new: a “Portrait of a Digital Learner,” derived from the district’s Portrait of a Graduate, meant to develop clear expectations around what skills students need and, by extension, which technologies are worth keeping and how technology would be used by students toward positive learning outcomes.

“We’re trying to get much [clearer] about what this is going to address,” says Warden. “What do we need students to learn, and which tools will help us understand where they are?”

Across the country, district leaders are asking similar questions. After years of rapid expansion, many are now engaged in a quieter but more consequential phase: reassessing what stays, what goes and how to decide.

From Buying Tools To Proving Value

For much of the past decade, edtech decisions often began with the product. A new platform promised to boost engagement or personalize learning; districts piloted it, added it to an already crowded ecosystem and moved on.

That approach is no longer sustainable, says Erin Mote, CEO of InnovateEDU, a nonprofit focused on systems change in special education, talent development and data modernization in schools.

“We’re seeing a shift from ‘Does this look cool?’ to ‘Does this work?’” she says. “Districts have less money now; they have to be smarter.”

The end of pandemic-era federal funding has intensified that pressure. Technology leaders are now expected not only to manage infrastructure and compliance, but also to demonstrate what Mote calls a return on instructional impact.

In practice, that is changing how districts approach procurement. Instead of starting with vendor demos, many are beginning with specific learning needs.

“If you need to improve third-grade reading comprehension, you start there,” Mote says. “Then you ask: Which tool can move that needle?”

New Playbook For Evaluation

As districts rethink their approach, a more structured and more skeptical evaluation process is emerging.

One major shift is toward tracking actual usage. Platforms like ClassLink and Clever now give districts detailed analytics on which tools students and teachers are accessing, how often they’re used and, in some cases, how much time is spent in each application. That data has helped uncover what some leaders call “zombie licenses,” products that continue to be renewed despite minimal use.

At Joliet Public Schools in Illinois, technology leaders review usage data each spring alongside feedback from a districtwide technology committee.

“If we’re not getting usage or we have another product that does it better, we start asking hard questions,” says John Armstrong, chief officer for technology and innovation.

But usage alone is not enough. Districts are also weighing cost, redundancy and alignment with instructional goals.

During the pandemic, many schools layered new tools on top of existing ones. Now, leaders are working to simplify.

“We had so many products that teachers were going to four different places to run a lesson,” says Kelly Ronnebeck, associate superintendent for student achievement in East Moline School District 37 in Illinois. “We’re trying to get back to a slower, more intentional process.”

That often means replacing several standalone tools with a single platform that can do multiple jobs — even if it means giving up some features teachers value. In some cases, a newer system can replace several standalone tools at a lower cost but may not match each one’s individual strengths.

“It’s not always a perfect swap,” admits Armstrong. “Someone gives up something.”

At the same time, districts are placing greater emphasis on interoperability and data privacy. Tools must integrate with existing systems like learning management platforms and single sign-on tools, and vendors have to be willing to sign increasingly stringent data privacy agreements.

“If a company can’t meet those requirements, that’s a red flag right away,” says Phil Hintz, CTO of Niles Township District 219 in Illinois.

The Challenge Of Proving What Works

Even as districts adopt more rigorous processes, it remains stubbornly difficult to determine whether edtech tools actually improve learning.

“It’s such a huge challenge,” says Naomi Hupert, director of the Center for Children & Technology at the Education Development Center. “We see so much that doesn’t seem to make a difference but costs a lot of money.”

Part of the difficulty lies in the sheer breadth of what “edtech” encompasses, everything from learning management systems to specialized math platforms to communication tools. Each category has different goals, users and measures of success.

“It’s like asking whether ‘books’ work,” says Hupert. “It depends on the book, the context and how it’s used.”

District leaders have to piece together evidence from multiple sources: vendor-provided analytics, small pilot studies, teacher feedback and, occasionally, external research. But those data points don’t always align.

Jason Schmidt, director of technology in Oshkosh Area School District in Wisconsin, describes his approach as “trust but verify.”

“I know vendors are collecting tons of data, and they have to, but I still need to talk to teachers and understand how the tool is actually being used,” he says.

Even then, results can be uneven. A platform might show strong engagement overall but fail to support certain groups of students — or vice versa.

In Alexandria City Public Schools in Virginia, leaders are developing a formal framework to evaluate both edtech and nontech programs. But defining “value” has proven complex.

“It’s not just usage and cost,” says CIO Emily Dillard. In a district with a high number of English learners, some tools play a critical role for students who need targeted or specialized support.

“You might have a tool that isn’t working for most students — or takes time to show results — but for a small group, it’s the best thing we have. We have to think about what’s best for them, too,” says Dillard.

Building Systems for Quality

Recognizing these challenges, a growing coalition of organizations is working to create clearer signals of quality in the edtech marketplace.

Through the Edtech Quality Collaborative, 1EdTech, CAST, CoSN, Digital Promise, InnovateEDU, ISTE, and SETDA are developing a shared framework built around five indicators: safety, evidence, inclusivity, interoperability and usability.

The goal, says Korah Wiley, senior director of edtech R&D at Digital Promise, is to reduce the noise.

“Right now, there are a lot of certifications and labels, and it’s hard for districts to know what to trust,” says Wiley. “We want to brighten the signal of what quality looks like.”

The initiative includes a planned directory of vetted validators, an implementation guide for districts and a central hub to connect educators with high-quality tools. Leaders hope it will help districts make decisions more confidently and push developers to meet clearer standards.

“This is the cost of doing business in education,” says Mote. “If you want to be in classrooms, you need to be building evidence and demonstrating impact.”

What Happens When Tools Are Cut

For all the talk of frameworks and data, the hardest part of reassessment often comes when districts decide to let a tool go.

Those decisions can affect classroom routines, teacher preferences and even student outcomes. And they are rarely straightforward.

In some cases, tools are phased out because of cost or low usage. In others, they are replaced by more comprehensive platforms. Sometimes, they no longer align with district priorities.

But even when the rationale is clear, the transition can be difficult.

“Teachers build practices around these tools,” says Warden. “We have to be thoughtful about how we support them through change.”

Districts are increasingly pairing those decisions with professional development, clearer communication and, in some cases, community engagement. In Warden’s district, the focus groups that helped define the “Portrait of a Digital Learner” are also shaping how the district explains its choices to families.

“We want to be transparent about what we’re using and why,” she says.

A More Intentional Future

As districts move into this new phase, many leaders describe it as a reset that is forcing them to be more deliberate about how technology fits into teaching and learning.

That includes pushing back on broader narratives that treat all screen time as equal.

“There’s a big difference between passive consumption and purposeful edtech and we need to be clear about this,” says Mote.

It also requires clearer alignment between technology decisions and instructional goals. Without that, even the best tools can fall short.

“If you don’t know what you want teaching and learning to look like, it’s very hard to decide what tools you need,” says Keith Krueger, CEO of CoSN.

Back in District 15, Warden and her colleagues are trying to build that alignment. The conversations sparked by their focus groups are informing not just which tools they keep, but how they define success.

“We’re still digging out from COVID, when we had to move fast and add a lot. Now we have an opportunity to be more strategic.”

For district leaders across the country, that shift may be the most important change of all. The future of edtech, they suggest, will not be defined by the number of tools schools use, but by how thoughtfully they choose them.

Anthropic’s sudden move to suspend access to its newest AI models following a U.S. government directive has raised fresh questions across the global technology industry. In India, the decision has reignited a long-running debate over whether one of the world’s largest AI markets can afford to rely on technologies built and controlled elsewhere.

The announcement came late Friday, when Anthropic said it had received the U.S. government directive requiring it to suspend access to its recently launched Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for all foreign nationals, including its own foreign national employees. The move came shortly after the company announced a partnership with Indian IT services giant Tata Consultancy Services to expand enterprise AI adoption in India, underlining how closely the country’s AI ambitions have become tied to technologies developed and governed in the U.S.

While the broader implications remain unclear, some reports said the initial security concerns were first reported to the government by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. And The Information said the White House is unlikely to extend similar restrictions to other AI companies and is privately blaming Anthropic’s handling of alleged jailbreak vulnerabilities. Anthropic has disputed the government’s characterization and argued the action should not have been taken.

Regardless, the development has triggered debate among Indian founders, investors, and policy experts over whether the country should accelerate efforts to build domestic AI capabilities, deepen investment in open-source alternatives, or continue relying on a handful of U.S. frontier model providers. For some, the episode is a wake-up call on technological dependence. For others, it is a reminder that access to increasingly critical AI systems can be shaped by geopolitical decisions beyond India’s control.

India has become one of the most important markets for frontier AI companies. Anthropic and OpenAI have both described the South Asian nation as their second-largest market after the U.S., reflecting its growing importance in the global AI race. The companies have already set up their offices in India, expanded local hiring, partnerships, and enterprise initiatives in recent months, betting on India’s vast base of developers, startups, and businesses to accelerate adoption of their latest technologies.

For many in India’s technology sector, Anthropic’s Friday announcement was about more than just one AI company. It reopened questions about the country’s long-term AI strategy and whether India could afford to remain dependent on a small number of foreign frontier AI providers.

“It completely changes things,” said Aakrit Vaish, founder of Indian AI venture platform Activate, referring to Anthropic’s decision. “I think this materially changes the way all of us should be thinking about sovereign AI in India.”

Vaish told TechCrunch that he woke up on Saturday morning “shocked and confused” by the announcement and said it strengthened the case for developing domestic AI capabilities. He expects startups to increasingly turn to open-source models and plans to encourage companies in his portfolio to reduce their dependence on a small number of frontier AI providers.

For some founders, the bigger concern was what restrictions on frontier AI access could mean for competitiveness. Vijay Rayapati, co-founder and CEO of Atomicwork, told TechCrunch that the episode highlighted the risks facing startups whose teams span multiple countries if access to advanced AI systems increasingly becomes subject to geopolitical restrictions.

Atomicwork has around 25 employees in the U.S., though much of its product engineering team is based in Bengaluru, India.

“If your AI team is not made up entirely of U.S. citizens, you are at a competitive disadvantage,” Rayapati said, arguing that unequal access to frontier AI models could give some companies a significant edge over rivals.

The concern comes as parts of India’s tech sector are already grappling with questions about how AI could reshape the economics of global talent. This week, U.S. real estate technology company Opendoor shut its India office less than two years after expanding in the country, with CEO Kaz Nejatian citing a push to bring operational work closer to customers in the U.S. and a shift toward smaller AI-native teams.

While Opendoor did not specify how much of the decision was driven by AI-related efficiencies, the move added to a broader debate about how advances in AI could affect the future of global technology work and what that might mean for India’s position as an engineering talent hub.

Beyond Anthropic

In addition to startups and AI builders, the Anthropic episode also prompted a broader debate among India’s technology leaders about dependence on foreign AI infrastructure.

Sridhar Vembu, founder of Indian SaaS company Zoho, said the move showed that “technology is the ultimate weapon” and urged Indian organizations to increasingly embrace smaller and open-source models.

“What can our government do right now? Ensure that orgs in India embrace smaller models, both Indian and Chinese open source ones,” Vembu wrote on X.

Investor and former Infosys executive Mohandas Pai responded to Vembu on X, arguing that the development highlighted the need for a far more ambitious national AI strategy and calling on the government to substantially increase investments in AI, computing infrastructure, and deep technology.

“We are way behind and need a national mission to get going quickly,” Pai wrote, urging the government to create an annual ₹500 billion (about $5 billion) fund for AI and deep tech, alongside a ₹2 trillion (around $21 billion) credit guarantee program to support cloud infrastructure, hardware, and semiconductor development.

Pai’s proposal would dwarf India’s existing AI efforts. In 2024, New Delhi approved the IndiaAI Mission with an outlay of ₹103.72 billion (about $1.2 billion) over five years, aimed at expanding compute infrastructure, supporting startups, and developing indigenous AI capabilities.

Despite growing interest in AI and New Delhi’s push to develop domestic capabilities, India remains a relatively small player in frontier model development. Only a handful of startups are pursuing foundational AI models, including Sarvam, which released open-source models earlier this year. However, another high-profile AI startup, Krutrim, pivoted toward cloud and AI infrastructure services after initially positioning itself around foundational model development.

Much of India’s AI ecosystem has instead concentrated on applications and specialized models built on top of existing foundation models. Recent examples include Avataar AI, which launched a video-generation model earlier this week aimed at providing a lower-cost alternative to offerings from rivals including Google’s Veo, Kling, Luma, and Runway.

Not everyone agrees that the primary challenge is a lack of capital. Responding to Pai’s comments, Lightspeed partner Hemant Mohapatra argued that the biggest constraints to building globally competitive AI companies are talent, access to computing resources, and execution, rather than simply the size of investment commitments.

Mohapatra estimated that training a frontier AI model could cost anywhere from hundreds of millions to several billion dollars, depending on the approach, but said successful AI companies have historically scaled their capital requirements over time as adoption grew.

Yet for some policy observers, the implications extend well beyond AI startups or model providers.

Prasanto Roy, a New Delhi-based technology policy expert who advises multinational companies, said the episode would likely reinforce concerns within the Indian government about strategic autonomy, comparing it to the lesson many countries drew from Russia’s loss of access to SWIFT and other parts of the global financial system following its invasion of Ukraine.

He told TechCrunch that the move was likely to provoke a significant nationalist backlash in India and described it as a poorly considered decision by Washington, with consequences extending far beyond Anthropic itself.

“Even if this is corrected or reversed, the Anthropic episode shows there’s no such thing as a geopolitically neutral foreign LLM,” Roy said. “American AI models are bound to American geopolitics.”