After OpenAI, Anthropic to set up India office

In the wake of several AI players looking to tap the Indian market for local talent and to set up data centres, Anthropic, the maker of the ‘Claude’ AI chatbot, said it will open its first India office in Bengaluru in early 2026. The San Francisco-based IT start-up was built in 2021 by former employees of the Sam Altman-headed OpenAI, which said that it was setting up an office in New Delhi.

OpenAI, which launched a ₹399 monthly plan to make ChatGPT more affordable for Indian users, had plans to set up a data centre in India, its second-largest market after the US, where it also has the largest base of student users.

Anthropic on Wednesday announced that Bengaluru will serve as its second office in the Asia Pacific after Tokyo, which will open in the coming months. “This expansion will help us serve India’s rapidly growing AI ecosystem and reflects the increasing international demand we’re seeing for Claude,” a company statement said, adding that its CEO Dario Amodei plans to visit India this week for meetings with officials and partners and may even meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Amodei was OpenAI's Vice President of Research prior to founding Anthropic.

Google and other top IT players investing in the AI space already have a presence in India even as most of these companies try to align themselves with the government’s IndiaAI Mission worth $1.2 billion that envisages making home-grown LLMs to boost national AI capabilities. For its part, Google has committed an investment of $10 billion in India over the next 5–7 years with a focus on digitising the economy and building India-first products.

“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 in the statement, emphasising, “There is deep alignment between the challenges India is tackling and our mission as a company, from deploying AI across diverse languages and contexts to building frameworks for responsible governance. India's AI ecosystem will play a central role in how AI develops globally and democratically, and we’re looking forward to working with organizations in India to pave a path for how beneficial AI can be scaled in a way that serves everyone.”

Like OpenAI, Anthropic will deploy AI for social impact in sectors like education, healthcare, and agriculture, as well as support key industries through strategic partnerships with Indian enterprises, nonprofits, and startups. The Bengaluru office will support India’s entrepreneurial ecosystem as it develops the next generation of dynamic companies, Anthropic said.

According to Anthropic’s recent ‘Economic Index Report’, India ranks second globally in consumer usage of Claude, behind the US. “Large Indian enterprises like CRED rely on Claude for their most critical coding work. And considering the rapid global adoption of Claude Code—with usage growing over 10x in just the first three months after its May launch—we believe Claude has the potential to dramatically accelerate growth among India's export-focused IT services industry,” the company said.

According to Anthropic, “Our expansion into India also dovetails with our continuing investment in advancing Claude’s Indic language capabilities. Building robust support for the languages and contexts that matter most to users in India will be a cornerstone of our work in the region. Claude already provides support across major Indic languages and will launch enhanced performance in Hindi and nearly a dozen additional languages, including Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, and Urdu. These extended capabilities will strengthen public sector adoption and enable broader access to AI across all of India.”