Anthropic opened its first office in India on Sunday, setting up shop in Bengaluru just as New Delhi hosted a massive AI summit that drew every major tech CEO to the country. The timing was not accidental.
The office, led by former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose, is Anthropic's second in Asia after Tokyo. It arrives days after the company closed a $30 billion Series G that valued it at $380 billion, giving it plenty of capital to throw at international expansion.
Why India, why now
Anthropic says India is Claude's second-largest market globally, behind only the US, with nearly half of usage in the country focused on coding and technical tasks. That's a telling stat. Indian developers aren't using Claude to write emails or brainstorm; they're building production software with it. Air India is already using Claude Code for custom software development, and Cognizant has deployed it to 350,000 employees worldwide.
The office announcement came with a string of partnerships across enterprise, education, and agriculture, the kind of launch-day list that companies assemble to signal seriousness to a new market. Anthropic claims its run-rate revenue in India has doubled since it first announced expansion plans in October 2025, though the company won't share the actual number, which makes that doubling hard to evaluate.
The download gap nobody's talking about
Here's the thing Anthropic's press materials leave out. When the company first announced India plans back in October 2025, CNBC reported that Claude had 118,000 downloads in India that August. ChatGPT had 10.3 million. Perplexity had 6.4 million. Being the second-largest market for Claude is a very different claim than being competitive in India's AI market.
OpenAI isn't sitting still either. Sam Altman confirmed at the AI Impact Summit that India now has 100 million monthly active ChatGPT users. OpenAI launched a sub-$5 subscription tier for the country and struck a deal with telecom giant Bharti Airtel. Anthropic had reportedly explored a similar partnership with Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries, but Google ended up grabbing that distribution channel for Gemini instead.
"India represents one of the world's most promising opportunities to bring the benefits of responsible AI to vastly more people and enterprises," Ghose said in Anthropic's announcement, which is the sort of thing every tech executive says about India. The more interesting signal is her background: 24 years at Microsoft, deep enterprise relationships, government connections. Anthropic is betting on a top-down enterprise sales motion, not a consumer land grab.
The language problem
More than a billion people in India speak one of over a dozen officially recognized languages, and AI models still perform significantly better in English. Anthropic says it launched a company-wide effort six months ago to improve Claude's performance in ten Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Telugu. It's working with organizations like Karya and the Collective Intelligence Project to build evaluations for agriculture and legal tasks in local contexts.
This matters more than the enterprise deals. India's IT services industry already works primarily in English. The real unlock, the thing that would make Claude useful to hundreds of millions of people rather than thousands of developers, is reliable performance in languages like Marathi or Gujarati. Anthropic isn't claiming it's solved this. It's claiming it's working on it, which at least is honest.
Summit spectacle
The five-day AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, where Anthropic made its announcement, expects 250,000 visitors and features Sundar Pichai, Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis all on the same stage. Delhi hotel prices went haywire; a suite at the Taj Palace that normally goes for $2,200 a night was listed at over $33,000. India's Supreme Court told lawyers they could appear by video during summit week because of anticipated traffic.
Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have already committed a combined $68 billion in AI and cloud infrastructure investment in India through 2030. Anthropic's Bengaluru office, which is hiring across engineering, sales, and policy roles, is a much smaller bet by comparison. But the company doesn't need to win the consumer race in India. If it can lock in enterprise contracts with the kind of IT services firms that serve global clients, the Bengaluru office could punch well above its weight.
The summit runs through February 20. Anthropic's careers page lists open positions at the new office.
