Anthropic officially opened its Bengaluru office on Sunday, its second in Asia after Tokyo, alongside a wave of enterprise, education, and public-sector partnerships that signal a deeper India commitment than most frontier AI labs have attempted.
India is already the second-largest market for Claude.ai. But the usage pattern here is what sets it apart: nearly half of all Claude activity in India involves computer and mathematical tasks, with developers building applications, modernising systems, and shipping production code. That profile makes India less a regional sales market and more a second engineering core for the company.
Run-rate revenue has doubled since October 2025, when Anthropic first announced its India expansion. Managing Director Irina Ghose, who will lead the Bengaluru office, put it plainly:
“India represents one of the world’s most promising opportunities to bring the benefits of responsible AI to vastly more people and enterprises. Already, it’s home to extraordinary technical talent, digital infrastructure at scale, and a proven track record of using technology to improve people’s lives.”
Enterprise traction, real numbers
The commercial partnerships land with weight. Air India is using Claude Code to help developers ship software faster. CRED achieved two-times faster feature delivery and ten percent better test coverage. Cognizant is deploying Claude across its 350,000 employees globally to modernise legacy systems and support AI adoption among enterprise clients.
The startup side is equally telling. Emergent, a platform that lets anyone build software by describing what they want, reached $25 million in annual recurring revenue and two million users in under five months, built entirely on Claude. Razorpay has embedded AI into risk systems and core operations. Rocket enables non-technical teams to build production-ready apps in minutes. Enterpret ships with Claude Code daily and has built an MCP integration bringing customer insights directly into Claude.
What this cohort represents matters beyond the metrics. India’s developers are not just adopting AI tools. They are building with them at infrastructure depth, embedding Claude into products that will reach millions of users. That makes India a compounding market, not a distribution channel.
The language gap is the real frontier
More than a billion people in India speak one of over a dozen officially recognised languages. AI models have consistently underperformed in those languages relative to English. Six months ago, Anthropic launched a company-wide effort to close that gap, curating higher-quality training data in ten languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, and Urdu. The effort has already produced measurable improvements.
Now the company is working with Karya and the Collective Intelligence Project to build evaluations that test performance on locally relevant tasks in agriculture and law, developed with domain experts from Digital Green and Adalat AI. The evaluations will be made publicly available, a meaningful commitment in a space where proprietary benchmarks are the norm.
Education, courts, and fifty million pending cases
Twelve percent of Claude.ai usage in India involves educational tasks, a substantial share given the scale of the country’s learning challenges.
Pratham, one of India’s largest education nonprofits, chose Anthropic as its first strategic AI lab partner. Its Anytime Testing Machine, powered by Claude, is being piloted with 1,500 students across 20 schools, with plans to reach 100 schools by end of 2026. The tool has also been adapted for over 5,000 learners in Pratham’s Second Chance programme, which supports women who dropped out of formal schooling.
Anthropic is also working with the Central Square Foundation to develop AI tools for children in underserved communities, including personalised tutors, teacher coaching, and assessment-driven instruction, providing technical expertise, mentorship, and API credits to organisations building in this space.
The judicial access problem is harder and more urgent. India has fifty million pending court cases. Routine updates take months to reach litigants. Accessing case information often requires repeated court visits or intermediaries navigating paper files and legal language. Anthropic is supporting Adalat AI’s national WhatsApp helpline, launched Sunday, which uses Claude to deliver instant case updates, document summarisation, translation, and interactive querying of legal documents in native Indian languages.
Infrastructure, agriculture, and open standards
Agriculture accounts for nearly a sixth of the Indian economy and employs close to half the workforce. Through the EkStep Foundation’s OpenAgriNet effort, Anthropic is working toward Claude deployments that give farmers and agricultural workers access to expert knowledge at population scale.
On the infrastructure side, the Indian Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation recently launched the first official Indian government Model Context Protocol server, built on the open standard Anthropic created and later donated to the Linux Foundation. The server lets users of any AI system access and query authoritative national statistics in an interoperable way. Swiggy is already using MCP to let users order groceries and make dining reservations directly through Claude.
Why this is different
Most AI lab expansions into India follow a recognisable script: an office, a few enterprise deals, press releases about talent pipelines. Anthropic’s announcement on Sunday was structurally different, not because the partnerships are more numerous, but because they span a range that no single commercial logic explains.
Building evaluations for Indic languages. Piloting assessment tools for women returning to education. Deploying legal access tools for a population navigating fifty million court backlogs. These are not natural commercial extensions of a language model company. They reflect a deliberate attempt to demonstrate that responsible AI development and genuinely broad deployment can happen together.
Whether that combination holds at scale remains to be tested. What Sunday’s announcement confirms is that India has moved from the edge of Anthropic’s strategy to one of its most seriously constructed commitments.
