Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the AI model Claude, has announced plans to expand its global operations to India, marking a major step in its international growth strategy. The company will open a new office in Bengaluru by early 2026, reinforcing its commitment to developing AI systems.
Anthropic’s Co-Founder and CEO Dario Amodei, who is visiting India this week, highlighted the nation’s unique position as a global AI hub. “India is compelling because of the scale of its technical talent and the government’s commitment to ensuring AI benefits reach all areas of society,” Amodei said.
The company’s India strategy focuses on three key pillars:
Empowering India’s entrepreneurial ecosystem to build globally competitive AI-driven startups.
Deploying AI for social impact across education, healthcare, and agriculture.
Forming strategic partnerships with Indian enterprises, nonprofits, and startups.
Bengaluru: Anthropic’s AI Hub in India
The new Bengaluru office—Anthropic’s second in the Indo-Pacific region after Tokyo—will serve as the company’s base for developing AI solutions tailored to India’s needs. The city was chosen for its deep pool of technical talent and proximity to India’s thriving enterprise ecosystem. The local team will focus on building AI applications for diverse Indian contexts and industries.
“Our expansion comes at a pivotal time when Indian enterprises and startups are seeking AI models they can trust,” said Paul Smith, Anthropic’s Chief Commercial Officer. “We see tremendous promise in India’s innovation ecosystem, where startups and developers are creating AI solutions impacting millions globally.”
Claude’s Growing Popularity in India
India is now the second-largest market for Claude, following the United States. According to Anthropic’s Economic Index, Indian users show a strong preference for technical and development-related tasks, including mobile UI design and web app debugging.
Anthropic is also investing heavily in improving Claude’s Indic language capabilities, expanding beyond Hindi to include Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, and Urdu. This localization aims to enhance AI accessibility in education, government, and social initiatives.
Partnerships for Societal Impact
Anthropic’s beneficial deployments team plans to collaborate with government organizations and nonprofits to leverage AI for India’s development goals. Planned initiatives include AI-driven public health analytics and AI-powered education tools that can reach millions of students. The company will also work with social entrepreneurs and accelerators to design locally relevant AI applications.
Indian businesses already use Claude via Anthropic’s API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud Vertex AI, ensuring access to AI models within trusted enterprise environments. Additionally, Indian developers can use Claude Code, Anthropic’s natural language command-line tool, to enhance coding productivity.
Anthropic currently serves over 300,000 business customers worldwide, with nearly 80 percent of consumer usage coming from outside the U.S. As India strengthens its role in the global AI ecosystem, Anthropic’s Bengaluru expansion positions it at the heart of responsible AI innovation in one of the world’s fastest-growing technology markets.
AI investment in India
Microsoft has pledged a US$3 billion investment over 2 years in India targeting cloud and AI infrastructure, education and skilling. As part of that, their ADVANTA(I)GE INDIA program which earlier aimed to train 2 million people by 2025 has already surpassed that target ahead of schedule. Microsoft is now committing to train 10 million more Indians by 2030 in foundational and advanced AI skills via partnerships with government, nonprofits, corporate stakeholders.
Microsoft has also made strategic collaborations across core sectors: with RailTel to build AI excellence in public sector and railways; with Apollo Hospitals for AI in healthcare (genomics, disease progression, multi-modal models); with Bajaj Finserv in financial services; with Mahindra Group in automotive, agriculture/farm, and finance; and with upGrad in EdTech to certify learners and build AI-enabled training content.
Databricks is investing $250 million to expand its India operations, boosting headcount (over 50% increase), opening a new R&D centre in Bengaluru, and launching a “Data + AI Academy” aiming to train 500,000 partners and customers over 3 years, Reuters news report said.
Zoho is entering the collaboration/productivity tools market with “Vani”, an AI-powered productivity and collaboration platform that intends to compete with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
Google is making a huge infrastructure push via a $10 billion plan for a 1-gigawatt capacity data centre cluster in Visakhapatnam, according to a news report in The Economic Times.
The Centre for Responsible AI at IIT Madras has released IndiCASA, a dataset designed to detect and assess bias in language models in the Indian context, including issues of gender, caste, religion, disability and socioeconomic status.
Emerging AI companies are launching innovations: Perplexity released the Comet browser, an AI-powered web browser marketed as a “personal assistant” that aims to enhance productivity for organizations.
Together Fund has started a programme called TogetherSwarmSpace, a 12-week initiative to support early-stage AI startups—offering investment, mentoring, and resources for building AI-first products.
Large Indian corporates are also doubling down: Reliance Industries has formed a new subsidiary called Reliance Intelligence to integrate AI across sectors; Mahindra Group’s Mahindra.AI is pushing AI in auto, real estate, hospitality; Godrej Enterprises has committed ~₹1,200 crore over 3-5 years toward GenAI/digital; Vedanta is applying AI innovations in metals & mining under a sustainability agenda.
Rajani Baburajan
