AI Summit 2026: India Can’t Just Build AI, It Must Manage the Disruption, Says Dario Amodei

At the AI Impact Summit, Anthropic’s CEO frames India’s AI moment as an economic transition challenge, not just a technology race. When conversations around artificial intelligence in India often centre on models, compute and talent pipelines, Dario Amodei offered a different lens at the AI Impact Summit: the real test for India will be managing the speed of economic disruption that AI is about to unleash.

Speaking in New Delhi, the Anthropic CEO positioned India not as a follower in the global AI race but as a country with a “central role” in shaping how AI-driven growth translates into broad-based prosperity, especially across emerging economies.

“India has an absolutely central role to play in these questions and challenges, both on the side of the opportunities and on the side of the risks,” Amodei said, underlining that scale alone makes India’s choices globally consequential.

AI Will Create Wealth, but the Transition Will Be Uneven

Amodei’s argument was less about whether AI will create wealth; he was clear that it will and more about how quickly economies will need to absorb change.

His core belief is that AI will “greatly grow the economic pie", including in India and across the global south. The risk, however, lies in the transition phase: job displacement, skill mismatches, and institutional lag.

Rather than framing AI disruption as a future problem, Amodei suggested it is already a governance challenge. The faster AI systems move from labs into enterprises, the shorter the window policymakers and industry leaders have to respond.

This framing subtly shifts the policy debate. The question is no longer whether India should back AI; that consensus already exists, but whether its institutions are ready for continuous economic reshaping.

A Call for Unlikely Conversations

One of the more practical takeaways from Amodei’s keynote was his emphasis on coordination: not just between governments and companies, but across disciplines that rarely share the same room.

He called for structured conversations involving economists, labour leaders, technologists and policymakers to prepare for AI-led disruption. The goal, he said, should be to manage “the time of disruption” rather than react after economic shocks become visible. This matters for India because of its labour-intensive economy. AI adoption in services, manufacturing and back-office operations could deliver productivity gains but also compress job cycles faster than traditional reskilling programmes can adapt.

The implication: AI policy cannot sit only within IT ministries or innovation cells. It must intersect with labour reform, education policy and social safety nets.

India’s AI Choices Will Be Watched Closely

Amodei also placed India’s AI choices in a global context. As the world’s largest democracy and one of the biggest technology labour markets, India’s approach to AI governance could become a reference point for other developing economies.

If India finds ways to align rapid AI deployment with economic stability, it could offer a blueprint for countries facing similar trade-offs between growth and disruption. If it doesn’t, the fallout from workforce stress to political pushback will be closely watched. Anthropic’s own expansion plans in India further signal that global AI firms see the country not just as a talent base, but as a strategic market where policy and adoption models may evolve differently from the West.

Execution Will Matter More Than Vision

India’s AI narrative so far has been heavy on ambition, sovereign models, digital public infrastructure and global leadership. Amodei’s intervention adds a note of caution without dampening optimism. The next phase of India’s AI journey will not be defined by announcements or summits, but by execution: how quickly institutions adapt, how realistically job transitions are planned, and how openly trade-offs are acknowledged.

In that sense, his message was less a keynote and more a quiet warning that building AI is the easy part. Managing what it does to an economy of 1.4 billion people is the real challenge. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says India’s AI challenge isn’t just innovation but managing rapid economic disruption as AI reshapes jobs, growth, and policy.