India well positioned to lead, shape future of AI: OpenAI's Sam Altman

Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Sam Altman said more than 100 million people in India use ChatGPT every week and that the country is well-positioned to lead the future of AI

OpenAI chief Sam Altman on Thursday said India is “well-positioned” to lead the world in artificial intelligence (AI), as he highlighted the country’s rapid progress and called for the democratisation of the technology.

 

Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Altman said it was "incredible to see the country’s leadership in advanced AI". He said in just over a year, AI systems have moved from struggling with high school-level mathematics to being able to do research-level mathematics and derive novel results in theoretical physics.

 

"100 million people in India use ChatGPT every week. More than a third of them are students," he said, adding that India is the fastest-growing market for Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent.

 

"India, the world’s largest democracy, is well-positioned to lead in AI. Not just to build it, to shape it and decide what our future is going to look like," Altman said.  Check India-AI Impact Summit 2026 Day 4 Updates

 

Further outlining an optimistic vision of the future, Altman said the industry may be "only a couple of years away" from early versions of true superintelligence. However, he stressed that the path forward lies in the democratisation of AI, as concentrating the technology in the hands of a single company or country could have damaging consequences.

 

A desirable future, he said, must ensure "liberty, democracy, widespread flourishing and an increase in human agency".

 

"We'll probably need super intelligence to help us figure out the new governance mechanisms to ensure that this happens fairly at scale and to avoid problems like extremely unbalanced compute access or something else," he said.

 

On jobs, Altman said AI would change the economics of many sectors and make services such as healthcare and education cheaper. However, current jobs are going to get disrupted as "AI can do more and more of the things that drive our economy", he said.

 

"Technology always disrupts jobs. We always find new and better things to do," Altman added.