Anthropic to set foot in India, open a new office in Bengaluru by early 2026

Anthropic, a four-year-old American artificial intelligence startup, has announced the opening of an office in Bengaluru, as Co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei is set to make a visit to India this week. The maker of Claude AI expects the operations in India to begin in early 2026, and the company will look to hire talent that would be focussed on building AI for unique local use cases in India.  

With Bengaluru as the second office in the Indo-Pacific region, following Tokyo, Japan, the company sees talent density and proximity to India’s startup ecosystem as the reason to choose the city. “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 organisations in India to pave a path for how beneficial AI can be scaled in a way that serves everyone," said Amodei in a company statement.  

India is the second biggest market—just behind the US—in use of Claude globally, according to the company’s  Anthropic Economic Index report, which captures AI adoption. India's use of Claude AI is largely for technical tasks and software development, such as mobile UI development and web app debugging. The company statement further said that it was also investing heavily in advancing Claude’s Indic language capabilities, prioritising model training in languages including Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, and Urdu. Claude will also work on an enhanced performance in Hindi for consumer interfaces.

Anthropic also plans to partner with government organisations and non-profits working in areas like locally-led, data-driven public health initiatives and collaboration with education organisations to pilot AI-powered learning tools and working with accelerators and social entrepreneurs to integrate AI into locally-relevant solutions.  

Valued at $183 billion post-money, in September this year, the company completed a Series F fundraising of $13 billion led by ICONIQ, co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The other significant investors in the round included Altimeter, Baillie Gifford, affiliated funds of BlackRock, Blackstone, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, General Atlantic, General Catalyst, GIC, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Jane Street, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, Qatar Investment Authority, TPG, T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., T. Rowe Price Investment Management among others.