In January this year, in his essay “The Adolescence of Technology: Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI,” Dario Amodei, Co-founder and CEO of AI company Anthropic, reflected on the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence capabilities. “Three years ago, AI struggled with elementary school arithmetic problems and was barely capable of writing a single line of code. Similar rates of improvement occur across biological science, finance, physics, and a variety of agentic tasks. If the exponential continues—which is not certain but now has a decade-long track record supporting it—then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.” 

'India has emerged as a key frontier market for Anthropic'

Even as the future of AI holds infinite but uncertain possibilities, India has emerged as a key frontier market for Anthropic, the developer of Claude. The company ranks India second only to the United States in terms of adoption, underscoring the country’s growing importance in the global AI ecosystem. According to its latest Economic Index report, Claude’s usage in India is concentrated in major technology hubs — Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, and Delhi NCR. The report indicates that adoption is being driven largely by India’s established technology workforce rather than mass consumer uptake, with usage heavily skewed towards software development and engineering roles.  

In January this year, the company appointed former Microsoft India Head Irina Ghose to lead its India operations, signalling the seriousness with which it is approaching the fast-growing market. In her first interview after assuming her new role at Anthropic, Ghose told Fortune India that the rapid pace of AI adoption and experimentation in the country was a key factor in her decision. She said the opportunity to work with an AI-native organisation aiming to drive transformational global impact motivated her to take up the position.  

“When you look at enterprises, what they need is safety, deployment which they can trust on, and compliance, and I think the part about both building technology and infusing safety and trust in the design is what comes with Anthropic fused into one. So that part was kind of resonating very closely,” Ghose told Fortune India.   

Anthropic looks to strengthen its India presence by hiring local talent

As Anthropic looks to strengthen its presence in India by hiring local talent across engineering, sales, and other functions, the company has identified three immediate priorities for the market. The first is aligning its work with India’s core development needs. “Whether it’s education, jobs and skilling, healthcare or agriculture, these are very core and working on nuanced use cases which make really definitive outcomes in the last mile, that's critical,” Ghose said. As part of this effort, Anthropic is partnering with one of India’s largest NGOs, Pratham, to build an ‘Anytime Testing Machine’ (ATM). The initiative uses Claude to create curriculum-aligned self-assessment tests, digitise handwritten student responses, automate grading, and provide personalised feedback, aimed at improving learning outcomes at scale. 

The second priority is partnering with enterprises to develop domain-led, contextual use cases that are relevant to companies and their customers. Ghose said the enthusiasm from IT and ITES firms for adopting Claude has been particularly encouraging. For instance, Cognizant is using Claude for internal requirements, including coding and other organisational workflows. The third focus area is engaging India’s vast developer and engineering talent pool. Anthropic aims to gather insights from this community, build on local innovation, and foster a strong developer ecosystem to drive wider, and more meaningful infusion of Claude. 

Apart from enterprise adoption, Anthropic is also looking at partnering with the Indian government from an India AI mission standpoint. As a part of their ongoing discussions, Irina said the government wants to create a consensus, along with model players, in using the economic impact study to track where is getting used and the economic shifts happening due to AI. “We are asking the government to tell us which are the sectors, most core, which are the partners, which will be most relevant for them, and then working alongside them,” she said.  

Currently, the company’s engagement with the Indian government spans multiple initiatives. These include adoption of its Model Context Protocol (MCP) by organisations such as the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation to support future-ready model development. Claude is also collaborating on MILU (Multi-task Indic Language Understanding), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI systems across Indian languages. In addition, the company is working with Karya, an impact-focused and ethical AI data startup and non-profit that provides digital work opportunities to economically disadvantaged communities.