U.S.-based artificial intelligence firm Anthropic has opened its first office in India, marking a significant expansion into a market where demand for AI tools is rapidly accelerating and competition among global tech players is intensifying. The new hub, located in Bengaluru, represents the company’s second Asian base after Tokyo and comes as its revenue in India has doubled on an annualized basis since October.
The move underscores how international AI developers are racing to establish a foothold in India, drawn by its vast developer base, expanding digital infrastructure, and surging enterprise adoption. Rival OpenAI, which launched operations in the country last year, already offers a streamlined version of its chatbot to Indian users at no cost, while U.S. search-focused AI firm Perplexity has made similar inroads.
Anthropic, however, is betting less on mass consumer uptake and more on enterprise integration. “India is one of the world’s most promising opportunities to bring the benefits of responsible AI to vastly more people and enterprises,” said Irina Ghose, the company’s managing director for India, citing the country’s technical talent and history of deploying technology at scale to solve real-world challenges.
India has already become the second-largest market for Anthropic’s AI assistant, with nearly half of its usage centered on mathematical computation and software development tasks. The company plans to deepen that footprint by expanding enterprise sales teams in Bengaluru, where current hiring is focused entirely on sales roles targeting corporations and startups.
Major Indian enterprises are beginning to embed the technology into daily operations. Conglomerate Tata Group has deployed the system within Air India to accelerate software development and reduce costs, while roughly 350,000 employees at Cognizant are already using it for coding and workflow automation.
The expansion arrives amid growing unease about how generative AI could disrupt employment across sectors such as programming, finance, marketing, and customer support. The anxiety has intensified following a wave of new automation tools released earlier this year, capable of handling complex development processes that were once human-led.
Such capabilities pose a direct challenge to India’s IT outsourcing giants, including TCS and Infosys, whose long-standing business models rely on billing clients based on human workforce deployment. Industry observers warn that AI agents capable of autonomously generating and maintaining software could compress that labor-driven revenue structure.
“If you go back in time, technology outsourcers said they would convert software development into a predictable process,” said Vineet Nayar, former CEO of HCL and now head of the nonprofit Sampark Foundation. “But AI agents are coming in, and software development is being overtaken by them.”
Despite the disruption risk, analysts note that outsourcing firms still retain a strategic advantage because of their deep integration into enterprise back-office systems and application maintenance. Their future competitiveness may depend on whether they can redesign business processes around AI rather than simply supplying manpower.
Alongside enterprise expansion, Anthropic is also investing in localization to broaden adoption. The company is training its models more rigorously in ten Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Malayalam, aiming to improve performance for regional users and tailor applications to local business and cultural contexts.
The Bengaluru launch signals that the global contest to shape the AI economy is increasingly being fought not just in Silicon Valley or Europe, but in emerging digital powerhouses where adoption at scale could determine the industry’s next phase.
