AI Summit: Can India achieve 20-25% growth because of AI? Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is optimistic

CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei was speaking at a panel discussion on the fourth day of the India AI Impact Summit.

• India could see 20-25 percent growth if AI adoption succeeds
• Anthropic's Claude usage has doubled in India recently
• Anthropic expands AI training for Indic languages with local partners

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India can possibly achieve 20-25 per cent growth if adoption of artificial intelligence succeeds in the country, CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei said on February 19.

Speaking at a panel discussion on the fourth day of the India AI Impact Summit with Infosys Co-founder and Non-Executive Chairman Nandan Nilekani, Amodei painted an unusually bullish picture of India’s economic potential if AI adoption succeeds.

"In the developed world, I've wondered what could AI lead us to — 10 per cent growth rates, which sounds absurd," he said.

"There's an enormous amount of technical potential and ability," Amodei said. "As I'm seeing, there's this eagerness to adopt AI. So India is one of the few places in the world where I wonder, could there be 20 or 25 percent growth."

Largely, Amodei said India could become the most important proving ground for whether AI delivers broad-based social and economic gains.

"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," he said. "AI is technology that has big risks and big benefits, but in the Global South, the benefits may be even bigger than they are anywhere else."

'Risk of AI real for democracies like India'

At the same time, he warned that democracies like India must grapple with risks of AI.

"India is the world's largest democracy. We need to think about how democracies handle AI and how we confront other countries that are authoritarian," Amodei said. "Another risk I talk about is making sure that AI systems are safe and predictable and autonomously behave in a way that’s under our control."

He added that economic displacement would be a key concern for India. "I think the signature of this technology is going to be that it greatly grows the economic pie for the whole world… but things are going to change, and there's some potential for disruption," he said.

Claude usage surges in India

He noted that usage of Anthropic’s tools had surged in recent months. "The use of Claude and Claude Code has doubled in India,"

"It’s more a statement about that kind of excitement in India on the enterprise level," Amodei added.

"India has a very long tail of regional languages," he said. "If you can only speak the most common languages, then there's a long tail we're not reaching."

Anthropic, he said, is working with Indian partners to expand training data for Indic languages.

"We put in place a push, collaborating with folks in India to acquire more data for this long tail of Indic languages," he said. "We want these models to be as good far out in the long tail of these languages as they are at speaking English. We're making progress towards that. We're not there yet, but we want to keep going."

On partnerships with Indian companies, Amodei said foreign AI firms needed to rely on local expertise.

"They know much more about the Indian market. They know much more about distribution. They know how to serve enterprises within India," he said. "Can we plug our technology into what they do and create something that wins for both sides? We would like to jointly win with the companies in India."