On a rainy and partly cloudy Friday evening last week (October 10), a group of 35 to 40 of India’s prominent figures in technology and startups assembled at the sprawling bungalow of Infosys co-founder and Aadhaar architect Nandan Nilekani.
Located on Bengaluru’s affluent “billionaire’s street” in Koramangala, the residence is known for its elegant decor, curated by Nilekani’s wife, writer and philanthropist Rohini Nilekani.
Nilekani occasionally hosts intimate dinners at his home, creating a space where visionaries and leaders from across the ecosystem can connect away from the public eye.
The occasion last week?
A chance for founders, business leaders and technocrats to get up, close and personal with Anthropic co-founder and chief executive Dario Amodei, one of the most influential voices on artificial intelligence in the world.
Who’s who in attendance
Some of the attendees included Wipro chairman Rishad Premji, Cred’s Kunal Shah, Meesho’s Vidit Aatrey, Ather’s Tarun Mehta, Rapido’s Aravind Sanka, Sarvam’s Vivek Raghavan, slice’ Rajan Bajaj, Jar’s Nishchay Ag, Prosus’ Ashutosh Sharma, Lightspeed’s Hemant Mohapatra and DPI (digital public infrastructure) visionary Pramod Varma, according to sources Moneycontrol spoke to.
Nilekani and the attendees declined to share details of the gathering.
What Amodei spoke about
The evening began with a fireside chat between Nilekani, often dubbed the chief technology officer of India, and Amodei.
People Moneycontrol spoke to said the scope of discussion was broad and wide-ranging, from Amodei’s background to why it is sharply focused on enterprises, India’s place in the global AI food chain and the societal benefits of this technology.
Amodei shared his insights on the future of AI, its applications in areas like healthcare and education, noting the short-term disruptions and the significant gains in productivity as the technology evolves.
He also reflected on Anthropic’s origins, explaining the firm’s focus on enterprise AI over consumer products due to concerns around safety and the unpredictable impact consumer AI can have, stressing the importance of adding real value.
Further, he touched upon India’s growing role in the AI ecosystem, pointing to the large number of developers in the country, adding that its still early days in AI, with a lot of white spaces in application and use cases.
Anthropic’s India play
This meeting followed a landmark week for Anthropic in India.
The Amazon and Google-backed foundational AI company had just announced an India office, Amodei met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and half a dozen key executives of the company were in startup capital Bengaluru for events organized by venture capital firms Accel and Lightspeed, among others.
Amodei also held meetings with senior executives at software giant Infosys as Anthropic advances its Claude AI and product suite across enterprises and startups.
What’s driving Anthropic’s push into India’s AI market?
These developments come as Anthropic looks to court India's booming AI developer community amid a scramble by tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta, all of whom are investing heavily to tap into one of the world's largest developer bases.
Around 50 percent of Claude, an AI tool, users in India use the software for technical purposes, and not general queries. That share stands at 30 percent in the rest of the world for Anthropic, Guillaume Princen said at an Accel event over the weekend.
Princen is global head of startups and head of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at Anthropic.
“50 percent of the usage of Claude in India is for technical usage. So, this is for UI, for code debugging, and general software development,” Princen said.
“In the rest of the world, that number is 30 percent. So, India is using disproportionately to build. And that for us at Anthropic is a real signal.”
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