India must use AI to make governance efficient, citizen-centric: Anthropic CEO

BENGALURU: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said even as artificial intelligence technology produces great value, it will also bring big economic turmoil. So it is important, he said, to ensure everyone shares in the benefits, and urged India, as the world's largest democracy, to use AI to make governance more efficient and citizen-centric. "That's a really valuable use of the technology," Amodei said at the maiden edition of Anthropic's Builder Summit in Bengaluru on Monday.

Anthropic, valued at $380 billion and whose AI products are used widely by enterprises to make coding more efficient, recently launched a slew of new tools for other enterprise functions like legal, sales and marketing that caused a collapse in the share prices of software and IT services companies around the world.


Amodei's visit coincided with the AI company launching its Bengaluru operations. Speaking to some 250 developers and entrepreneurs, he noted that the technical intensity of AI adoption in India tends to be higher than elsewhere. He said he's heard ministry of statistics is building an AI system to query economic data and statistics. "Generally, govt bodies elsewhere don't move this fast," he said.

Anthropic's business run rate revenue in India, he said, has doubled over the past four months. "It's just really incredible... It mirrors the general progress and explosion in Claude models and coding models. But I think it's even more extreme in India than we've seen in other places of the world."

Amodei also pointed to India's extraordinary scale as a catalyst for innovation. "You can run experiments with hundreds of millions of people. That scale allows entrepreneurs and builders to pivot quickly and learn faster in ways that simply aren't possible in smaller markets."

He said India's linguistic diversity as a powerful driver for AI innovation. It enables, he said, building tools interoperate across languages, make translation easier, and enable true multilingual capabilities. Claude, he said, is working hard to support the long tail of languages, and "with so many regional languages in India, I've seen some cool applications, including in the non-profit and social benefit space."

On the philosophy of his 38-page essay 'The Adolescence of Technology', Amodei said, "We need to understand that this technology is really going to change the world at a speed and to a degree that we haven't seen with any other technology before. That may sound hyperbolic, but if we look at the rate of improvement, diffusion, and adoption, it's something that has no real precedent in modern history." The essay emphasises core principles aimed at protecting against the worst-case risks posed by AI.

Amodei highlighted the transformative potential of AI in specialised fields such as medicine and biology, noting that innovations rooted in the physical world are likely to create the most defensible businesses. "I really encourage people to build where AI intersects with areas like medicine and health. The biggest moats will come from applications tied to the physical world - things that aren't easy to do and require specialised skills. Biology and medicine fit all of those criteria. It's a complex, knowledge-heavy space that involves navigating regulatory systems, but that hard work will lead to durable businesses. So I strongly encourage builders to move in that direction."

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