Anthropic Bets Big on India as AI Demand Surges

Anthropic’s decision to expand into Bengaluru signals more than geographic growth—it reflects a strategic bet on India as a core engine of enterprise AI adoption. With India now the second-largest market for Claude, the company is aligning itself with one of the world’s fastest-scaling digital economies.

Unlike consumer-led AI markets, India’s traction appears enterprise-driven. A significant portion of Claude’s domestic usage is tied to coding, legacy system modernization, and technical workloads. Air India’s deployment of Claude Code for custom software development and Cognizant’s rollout to 350,000 employees highlight a shift from experimentation to operational integration. These are not pilots—they are structural transformations.

India’s role as a global IT services hub makes it uniquely positioned in the AI value chain. By embedding Claude within system integration, modernization, and enterprise automation projects, Anthropic effectively taps into a multiplier effect—each large IT provider can propagate AI capabilities across global clients.

Competition, however, is intense. OpenAI also counts India among its largest markets, with CEO Sam Altman citing 100 million weekly active users for ChatGPT globally. The race is no longer about model quality alone but ecosystem depth, partnerships, and local credibility.

Strategically, Anthropic’s expansion reflects three investment themes: enterprise AI as infrastructure, India as a deployment hub, and coding assistants as productivity multipliers. By focusing on regulated industries, modernization programs, and public-interest collaborations, the firm positions itself as a long-term enterprise partner rather than a standalone chatbot provider.

In essence, India is becoming a proving ground for scalable, production-grade AI. For Anthropic, the Bengaluru office is not symbolic—it is an investment in the operational core of global AI transformation.