After OpenAI, yet another AI giant is setting up shop in India.
Anthropic announced today that it will expand its global operations to India with plans to open an office in Bengaluru in early 2026. The move marks a significant milestone for the AI safety-focused company, which will establish Bengaluru as its second Asia Pacific office after Tokyo, scheduled to open in the coming months.
CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei is visiting India this week to meet with public officials and enterprise partners as the company deepens its commitment to the region.
“India is compelling because of the scale of its technical talent and the commitment from the Indian government to ensure the benefits of artificial intelligence reach all areas of society, not just concentrated pockets,” Amodei said. He emphasized the alignment between India’s challenges and Anthropic’s mission, particularly in deploying AI across diverse languages and contexts while building frameworks for responsible governance.
Strong Existing Presence
The expansion comes as India already shows strong adoption of Claude, Anthropic’s flagship AI assistant. According to the company’s recent Economic Index Report, India ranks second globally in consumer usage of Claude, trailing only the United States. Notably, Indian users demonstrate a disproportionately high engagement with technical and programming-related tasks, including mobile UI development and web app debugging.
Major Indian enterprises are already integrating Claude into critical workflows. CRED, one of India’s prominent fintech companies, relies on Claude for essential coding work. The rapid adoption of Claude Code—which saw usage grow more than tenfold in just three months following its May launch—suggests significant potential for accelerating growth in India’s export-focused IT services industry.
Strategic Focus Areas
Anthropic’s India operations will prioritize deploying AI for social impact across sectors including education, healthcare, and agriculture. The Bengaluru office will also support strategic partnerships with Indian enterprises, nonprofits, and startups, helping to nurture the country’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
“Our expansion comes at a pivotal moment when Indian enterprises and startups are seeking AI models they can trust,” said Paul Smith, Anthropic’s Chief Commercial Officer. “They need systems that combine frontier performance with the safety and reliability required to support critical business operations at the massive scale that they operate.”
Language Capabilities Expansion
A cornerstone of Anthropic’s India strategy involves advancing Claude’s Indic language capabilities. While Claude already supports major Indic languages, the company will launch enhanced performance in Hindi and nearly a dozen additional languages, including Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, and Urdu. These improvements aim to strengthen public sector adoption and enable broader AI access across India’s linguistically diverse population.
The expansion positions Anthropic to tap into India’s vibrant developer community and innovation ecosystem, which Amodei described as playing “a central role in how AI develops globally and democratically.”