India must harness AI to streamline governance, says Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei

India, as the world’s largest democracy, has a unique opportunity to use artificial intelligence to make governance more efficient and citizen-focused, said Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic, on Monday, reported TOI. Speaking at the inaugural edition of Anthropic’s Builder Summit in Bengaluru, Amodei highlighted both the immense value and potential disruption AI can bring.

“That's a really valuable use of the technology,” Amodei said, underlining the potential of AI to improve public services and streamline government processes.

Anthropic, valued at $380 billion, is widely known for its AI products that enhance enterprise efficiency, particularly in coding. Recently, the company launched a range of new tools targeting other enterprise functions, including legal, sales, and marketing, moves that rattled software and IT services stocks globally.

AI adoption in India progressing rapidly

Amodei’s visit coincided with the launch of Anthropic’s Bengaluru operations. Addressing around 250 developers and entrepreneurs, he observed that AI adoption in India tends to be technically intensive. “Generally, govt bodies elsewhere don't move this fast,” he noted, citing the Ministry of Statistics’ efforts to build an AI system capable of querying economic data and statistics.

He added that Anthropic’s business run-rate revenue in India 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.”

Scale and diversity as drivers of AI innovation

Amodei pointed to India’s vast population as a unique advantage for experimentation and 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 also highlighted linguistic diversity as a powerful driver for AI development. It enables tools to operate across multiple languages, simplifying translation and supporting multilingual capabilities. “Claude… 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.”

AI’s transformative potential in medicine and beyond

Reflecting on the ideas in his 38-page essay, The Adolescence of Technology, Amodei stressed the unprecedented speed at which AI is reshaping the world. “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.”

He urged builders to focus on areas where AI intersects with specialized fields like medicine and biology. “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.”

With inputs from TOI