Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: India may benefit most from AI revolution

When Dario Amodei takes the stage, he doesn’t deal in small futures, that’s for sure. At the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, the Anthropic CEO and co-founder framed AI not as a Silicon Valley inevitability, but as a fork in the road, particularly for India and the Global South.

“I think in the global south, there’s an opportunity for AI to accelerate catch-up growth, to solve a bunch of problems that are in the way of catch-up growth,” Dario Amodei said, during a special interview where he sat alongside Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys and architect of UIDAI, at the India AI Impact Summit 2026. 

“I think AI is a technology that has big risks and big benefits. But in the global south, and for India, the benefits may be even bigger than they are anywhere else,” Amodei said.

While responding to questions from the Indian moderator on stage, the Claude AI chatbot maker’s tone was measured and without any hyperbole. The Anthropic CEO wasn’t harping about wanton techno-utopianism. Far from it, Amodei was all about strategic arithmetic.

Amodei repeatedly returned to a core tension: AI capability versus AI diffusion. Where diffusion meant proliferation of all the good that’s possible by unlocking AI’s potential for countries like India and in the global south.

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“There is this duality between the fundamental capabilities of the technology and the time that it takes for those capabilities to diffuse into the world,” he explained. Even if progress froze today, “the economic impact could be much greater than it is because it just takes time. There are just frictions to adopt things through enterprises. And I think even more so in the developing world.”

In other words, AI models like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini may be sprinting. Institutions are only just starting to jog in response, Amodei noted.

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Yet in India, the Anthropic CEO senses something different. “There’s just an excitement here and a technical acumen,” he said. Usage patterns reflect it. “Use of Claude for technical kinds of programming and software engineering, mathematical tasks, the fraction is substantially higher here in India than it is in most other places in the world.”

Similar sentiment has been expressed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis while speaking at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, as well.

More telling than the metrics is the mood, according to Dario Amodei. “Every time I go to speak at one of these builder or developer events in India, there’s a lot of excitement. I can feel the brimming excitement of what is something that we can build.” This isn’t passive consumption of AI, it’s builder energy.

And Amodei believes India may be uniquely positioned to convert that energy into macroeconomic acceleration. “There is so much technical potential and technical adeptness in India,” he observed. “AI could really accelerate economic growth because it seems like the base ingredients are kind of all there and AI could help to tie them together.”

Then came the line that’s sure to give the economists some serious pause. “India is one of the few places in the world where I wonder, could there be 20 or 25% growth, it kind of stacks all the factors for a very bullish picture of how that growth could happen,” Amodei said, with exaggeration.

That optimism is tempered with realism. “That doesn’t mean, of course, that the risks aren’t real,” he cautioned. “India’s the world’s largest democracy. We need to think about how democracies handle AI.”

Still, his thesis is clear, that AI will enlarge the economic pie. “The signature of this technology is that it greatly grows the economic pie for the whole world,” he said – even if disruption comes with it.

For Amodei, India isn’t just another market. It’s a stress test for the idea that AI can compress decades of development into a handful of years. And if the energy at India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi is any indicator, the experiment may well and truly be underway.

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