India in this context is a synecdoche for scaling consumer vs Anthropic's more enterprise-y route, but yes that's pretty much why we didn't get 4.5 with reasoning. Without reasoning, 4.5 had no future.

From Sam Altman himself:

> We had this big GPU crunch. We could go make another giant model. We could go make that, and a lot of people would want to use it, and we would disappoint them. And so we said, let’s make a really smart, really useful model, but also let’s try to optimize for inference cost. And I think we did a great job with that.

4.5 scaled into a unified reasoning model would have been an incredible model. It beat GPT-5 on accuracy and hallucinations without reasoning (!)

It just wouldn't have worked for powering things like ChatGPT Go's rollout and loginless chatgpt.com, so they dropped it.

(And if you want, you could argue it's the compute crunch that didn't let them do both... but Anthropic had to make the same choices at the time and went in the other direction.)