Anthropic Pushes Into India With Airline and Startup Pacts

Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic has opened its first office in India.

With the company’s new office in Bengaluru, announced Monday (Feb. 16) and partnerships with the likes of Air India, the maker of the Claude chatbot is hoping to boost AI usage in the world’s most populous country.

“India is the second-largest market for Claude, home to a developer community doing some of the most technically intense AI work we see anywhere,” Anthropic said in a news release. “Nearly half of Claude usage in India comprises computer and mathematical tasks: building applications, modernizing systems and shipping production software.”

Among the company’s new partnerships is a collaboration with Air India, which is employing Claude Code to help developers ship custom software faster and at reduced cost as it tries to increase agentic AI usage.

Meanwhile, online payments platform Razorpay has integrated AI into risk systems, decision-making processes, and operations throughout the company. Emergent, an AI-powered platform built solely using Claude that allows users to build software by describing what they want in plain language, achieved $25 million in annual recurring revenue and two million users in under five months, Anthropic said in the release.

“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, managing director of India for Anthropic, said in a statement. “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. That’s exactly the foundation you need to make sure this technology reaches the people who can benefit from it most.”

At the same time, India presented a challenge to Anthropic: while more than a billion people there speak upwards of a dozen officially recognized languages, AI models to perform better in English than in other languages.

To that end, Anthropic has launched an effort to close this gap by cultivating training data using 10 of the most widely spoken languages in India, leading to improvements in its models.

As covered here last month, India has emerged as the most aggressive adopter of agentic AI, with nearly half of organizations pointing to it as a chief strategic focus and roughly half of all executives expecting AI to generate over 15% revenue uplift in the next five years.

“India’s adoption is even more extreme compared with the rest of the world,” said Anthropic Co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei, per a report Monday by Bloomberg news. “We can do experiments with hundreds of millions of people.”