This article offers a critical appraisal of the Competition Commission of India’s Market Study on Artificial Intelligence and Competition (2025), commissioned to examine the evolving interface between AI technologies and competition law in India. While the study represents a significant institutional effort to map the Indian AI ecosystem and to anticipate emerging competition concerns, this appraisal argues that its analytical ambitions remain constrained by an advocacy-oriented and largely technocratic framing. The article evaluates the study across four dimensions: conceptual framing, methodology, competition analysis, and regulatory recommendations. It acknowledges the study’s strengths in conceptualising AI as a multi-layered ecosystem encompassing data, compute, algorithms, and applications, and in identifying risks related to algorithmic collusion, price discrimination, entry barriers, and ecosystem consolidation. However, it highlights key limitations, including an over-reliance on perception-based stakeholder inputs, the absence of rigorous market power analysis, and a cautious stance towards structural dominance and Big Tech power. The appraisal further contends that the study under-theorises AI as an infrastructural and epistemic force capable of entrenching durable asymmetries within markets and across global value chains. By situating the CCI’s study within comparative antitrust and AI governance debates, the article argues for a more empirically grounded, normatively explicit, and forward-looking competition policy approach. It concludes that while the study is a valuable first step in India’s engagement with AI-driven market power, it should be treated as a foundation for deeper inquiry rather than a settled regulatory blueprint.