Benefits of AI to Be Bigger for Global South, India; Huge Upside for Economic Growth: Amodei

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Thursday said the benefits of AI in the Global South are more pronounced than anywhere else in the world, emphasising that India's considerable technical expertise and eagerness to adopt AI present significant growth potential.

In a fireside chat at the AI Impact Summit 2026, Amodei said that while AI adoption has the potential to boost growth, we need to make sure that AI systems are safe and predictable and autonomously behave in a way that's under human control.

Stating that AI can be used to accelerate economic growth if the AI developers and those who do the actual medical research can work together in India, which has a large population base.

"There is so much technical potential and technical adaptiveness in India. It actually almost seems like a perfect case study for the idea that 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," Amodei said.

He said that in the developed world, AI usage could lead to a 10 per cent economic growth rate.

"Here in India, there's a lot of catch-up growth to be done. There's an enormous amount of technical potential and ability, and, 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 per cent growth, which is, you know, sounds absurd, is unknown anywhere in the world, but, but as I think about this, it kind of stacks all the factors for a very bullish, picture of how that growth could happen," he said.

Talking about artificial intelligence adoption in the Global South, Amodei said that there's an opportunity for AI to accelerate growth and solve a bunch of problems that are in the way of catch-up growth.

"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. But at the same time, that doesn't mean, of course, that the risks aren't real," he said.

Amodei said, "We need to think about how democracies handle AI and how we confront other, other countries that are authoritarian. That's one of the risks".

Another risk would be to make sure that AI systems are safe, predictable and autonomously behave in a way that's under human control.

"Everyone in the world has to worry about that. I think of particular relevance to India is the concerns raised around economic displacement. The signature of this technology is gonna be that it greatly grows the economic pie for the whole world. The huge upside is because of the opportunity for catch-up growth, ...but, there things are going to change, and there is some potential for disruption," Amodei said.