The IndiaAI Mission has launched three indigenous AI models. Their uses range from offline access on smartphones to strategic work in banking, cybersecurity and defence.
The models are EKA-1, Dhir-2B and Dhir-5B. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) formally launched them on November 3. They come under the Foundation Model initiative of the IndiaAI Mission. Bengaluru-based Soket Labs and ZenteiQ built them.
Offline AI on Smartphones
ZenteiQ’s Dhir-2B and Dhir-5B are compact models. They can run directly on smartphones with no internet connection. That puts AI services within reach of users in areas with weak connectivity.
Prof. Sashikumaar Ganesan, Founder and Chief Scientist of ZenteiQ, said users get access as soon as they download the models.
A Larger Model for Demanding Tasks
Soket Labs EKA-1 has 26.3 billion parameters and was trained on 7.5 trillion tokens. It is built for maths, coding and reasoning tasks. It can be deployed on private servers, private clouds and environments without internet access.
Abhishek Upperwal, CEO of Soket Labs, said the model could cut reliance on US AI companies.
The Push for AI Autonomy
At the launch, S. Krishnan, Secretary at MeitY, said indigenous models can strengthen India’s strategic AI autonomy. He said their potential in secure, air-gapped enterprise settings is critical. In those settings, systems can run without a link to outside networks.
The launch comes as India looks to cut its dependence on foreign AI technology. In June, Anthropic suspended access to its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models to comply with US export controls. It restored access in July.
CERT-In Gains Access to Mythos
Hours after the launch, reports said India’s cybersecurity agency CERT-In had secured access to Anthropic’s Mythos model. The model has proven strength in finding software vulnerabilities, and CERT-In aims to use it to strengthen India’s cyber defence.
There is a catch. Government agencies cannot download Mythos’s source code or weights to run on their own systems. To use it, they must send their proprietary data, code or network blueprints over the internet to Anthropic’s cloud servers.
