Token Governance

I recently went to my previous organisation, within the government, to meet my colleagues. Around noon. One colleague was calling up another and asking, “Sir, my Claude tokens are over for today, do you have it.” The Sir had consumed his too. The colleague then called a third, and got lucky. Sitting there, I wondered about it.

There is something magnificent and terrible about a government officer of the Republic of India, custodian of sovereign power, signatory to files that move crores of public money, calling up a colleague at noon to borrow AI tokens the way a schoolboy borrows a pencil before a maths exam. These are people who can, theoretically, deny you a licence, approve a policy, or sanction a project. And yet here they are, rationing between themselves the capacity to think with a machine, pooling subscriptions like a college dormitory splits a Netflix account. The government has nineteen committees on AI adoption, numerous Karmayogi courses force-fed to officers by linking completion to annual appraisals, and bosses who drop AI into every meeting the way my maid drops mustard into every dish. What the government conspicuously does not have is a clear budget line for the thing that actually does the AI. The sovereign AI, whatever developmental state it is currently in, is not exactly being queued up for by anyone. And so I left, still wondering.

But here is what stays with you. They were using it. Borrowing tokens from each other, because it was useful enough to be worth the embarrassment of the asking. That is, in its way, a kind of love. A man does not call three colleagues to borrow something he does not need. Somewhere in that chain of calls was a note that needed to be sharper, a brief that deserved more than boilerplate, or a presentation crafted precisely in the style the boss likes, possibly now immortalised in some private skill.md file. I feel happy and sad in equal measure. Happy that my colleagues are using frontier AI in their work, even if it is for writing crisper notings. Sad that most are paying for it from their own pockets while cheerfully feeding government data into a foreign model for further training. The case for sovereign AI is obvious, even if it runs a generation behind the frontier. I am not losing sleep over the forex drain from token purchases; token prices will fall, this is a transitory phase. What worries me is the data. But then, knowing how ultra-sensitive material gets hurled around in departmental WhatsApp groups every day, what exactly am I kidding about. And leaving all of that aside, there is a certain sweet poetic justice in watching generalist bosses use AI to compile lists of tasks for specialist subordinates, who then complete those tasks using, of course, the same AI. It is like that famous saint’s saying, now perhaps sitting in a token country, come home at last: “…that me, through this me, is talking to me…”.