At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman set out an ambitious view of where artificial intelligence is heading—on cost, capability and policy—and how India could shape (and be shaped by) that trajectory.
Across a keynote and a closed door editors’ briefing, his thought process was clear: AI prices are plunging, capabilities are leaping, and India is racing ahead in adoption.
Altman praised India’s momentum and scale. He called the country “well positioned to lead and shape the future of AI”, and noted the rapid capability jump from systems that struggled with high school maths a year ago to those now tackling research level mathematics and even producing novel results in theoretical physics. He also cited India’s vast user base and developer energy, describing it as among OpenAI’s fastest growing markets for coding tools.
Beyond capability, Altman signalled a continued collapse in AI costs. He said at a select editor’s briefing that he was “optimistic that we are going to drive prices down more than anyone thinks is possible or reasonable or likely,” adding that cheaper AI disproportionately benefits the Global South.
“The cost of getting a difficult, high quality answer out of our models has fallen more than a thousand fold since two Decembers ago—about fourteen months,” Altman said. “I don’t know if we can deliver that again in the next fourteen months—I suspect we can’t—but costs will come down dramatically.”
He feels that per unit of intellectual output, energy cost won’t be dominant, though the global footprint still matters as usage soars.
A recurring theme in Altman’s briefings was that resources are shifting from training to inference: “More of the resources are needed today for inference than training, and that will continue… I think that ratio can increase,” Altman said. The question for governments such as India’s, he added, is how to balance the desire for local inference with resource trade offs, or whether to outsource compute across borders.
He stressed this is ultimately a national policy decision: “I’ve been surprised by how different leaders feel about whether they want AI infrastructure. It will be up to each country.”
On whether India can be a revenue market, not just a large user market, he was blunt: “I think it has to be,” he said. “One thing that’s different about AI is that the cost of delivering these services is higher. To meet the volume of AI that India will demand, we’ll have to find ways for it to be an attractive market as well.”
At the AI summit, he reinforced India’s momentum, calling it well positioned to lead and highlighted a very large weekly user base for ChatGPT in the country.
From the keynote stage at the Summit, Altman framed India as a central actor in the next phase of AI—both in building and shaping it—and hinted at an accelerating roadmap that could bring earlier than expected leaps, provided governance and access keep up.
“It’s incredible to see the country’s leadership in advanced AI,” he said, arguing that democratisation and human agency must define the path forward.
First Published: Feb 20, 2026, 15:38
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