Anthropic Opens Bengaluru Office as India Becomes Second-Largest Claude Market
Joerg Hiller Feb 16, 2026 08:37
AI safety company Anthropic expands India operations with new Bengaluru office, enterprise partnerships, and multilingual initiatives as revenue doubles since October.
Anthropic has officially opened its Bengaluru office and rolled out a wave of partnerships across India's enterprise, education, and agriculture sectors. The move cements India's position as Claude's second-largest market globally, with the company's India run-rate revenue doubling since its October 2025 expansion announcement.
The timing is notable. Just days ago, Anthropic closed a massive $30 billion funding round that pushed its valuation to $380 billion—making this India push part of an aggressive global expansion backed by serious capital.
Why India Matters to Anthropic
Nearly half of Claude usage in India involves computer and mathematical tasks: building applications, modernizing legacy systems, shipping production code. That's technically intense work that validates the market's sophistication.
"India represents one of the world's most promising opportunities to bring the benefits of responsible AI to vastly more people and enterprises," said Irina Ghose, Anthropic's Managing Director of India. She pointed to the country's technical talent pool and digital infrastructure as key factors.
The office—Anthropic's second in Asia after Tokyo—will focus on hiring local talent and providing applied AI expertise to customers ranging from large enterprises to early-stage startups.
Enterprise Wins Stack Up
The partnership roster reads like a who's who of Indian tech. Air India is deploying Claude Code to accelerate custom software development. Fintech giant CRED reports 2x faster feature delivery and 10% better test coverage. Cognizant is rolling Claude out to 350,000 employees globally for legacy system modernization.
Among startups, Razorpay has integrated AI across risk systems and operations. Emergent, an AI software platform built entirely with Claude, hit $25 million in annual recurring revenue and two million users in under five months.
Tackling the Language Gap
Here's where it gets interesting for a market of 1.4 billion people. Anthropic launched a six-month effort to improve Claude's performance in 10 major Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, and Urdu.
The company is now partnering with Karya and the Collective Intelligence Project to build evaluations testing performance on locally relevant tasks in agriculture and law. These benchmarks will be made publicly available—a move that could influence how other AI labs approach Indic language development.
Government and Public Sector Adoption
The Indian Ministry of Statistics launched the first official government MCP server, enabling AI systems to query national statistics through Anthropic's open-source Model Context Protocol. Swiggy is using MCP to let users order groceries and make reservations directly through Claude.
Anthropic is also backing Adalat AI's WhatsApp helpline launching today, which uses Claude to provide instant court case updates and legal document translation for India's 50 million pending cases.
With $14 billion in annualized revenue and fresh capital to deploy, Anthropic's India bet looks like the opening move in a longer play to capture enterprise AI spend across emerging markets.
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