Anthropic heads to India with new Bengaluru office

Anthropic is planting its flag in India’s tech capital.

The AI maker announced plans to open a new office in Bengaluru in early 2026. This marks its second footprint in the Asia-Pacific region following its upcoming Tokyo location.

CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei is spending the week in India to lay the groundwork, and his itinerary goes well beyond typical corporate handshakes.

Courtroom to boardroom

According to reporting from TechCrunch, Amodei's trip includes a stop in New Delhi to meet with top government officials and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

He is also heading to Mumbai to sit down with executives at Reliance Industries, India’s most valuable conglomerate and parent company of telecom giant Reliance Jio. Anthropic has reportedly been in ongoing talks with Reliance over a partnership to distribute Claude across the country.

That potential alliance is especially spicy because OpenAI was previously exploring a partnership with Reliance. That deal was slated to be announced during Sam Altman’s scheduled visit last month, before Altman abruptly postponed the trip.

Meanwhile, Anthropic is rallying the local ecosystem. Joining Amodei are EMEA chief Guillaume Princen and startups head Daniel Delaney, with blue-chip VC firms like Accel and Lightspeed hosting dedicated founder sessions to hook builders directly into Claude.

Indian devs are driving the boom

Anthropic isn’t expanding to India just for the optics; the usage metrics are already massive.

India ranks as the second-largest consumer market for Claude worldwide, trailing only the United States, according to Anthropic’s own Economic Index Report and traffic data from Similarweb.

More importantly, Indian users are heavily leaning into Claude for technical heavy lifting. Developers and local powerhouses like fintech firm CRED are deploying Claude for mobile UI engineering and web app debugging. Anthropic noted that usage of its Claude Code tool surged over 10x in its first three months alone.

Mobile adoption is accelerating as well. Appfigures estimates Claude app installs in India reached 767,000 this year, with September downloads jumping 48% year-over-year. In-app consumer spending surged 572% to $195,000 in September.

To lock in the market, Anthropic is rolling out upgraded performance across Indic languages, planning enhancements for Hindi alongside nearly a dozen languages like Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, and Urdu.

Why it matters

For developers and IT professionals, Anthropic's on-the-ground presence in Bengaluru is a clear win. India's vast software outsourcing sector runs on developer efficiency, and having direct ecosystem backing alongside upcoming support for regional languages makes Claude an even more indispensable daily coding assistant.

Across the AI landscape, we're seeing distinct playbooks emerge for conquering the world's second-largest internet market. OpenAI picked New Delhi, focusing on regulatory lobbying and commercial enterprise while testing a sub-$5 budget subscription. Perplexity teamed up with telecom operator Bharti Airtel to bundle its Pro tier to 360 million subscribers.

We think Anthropic’s strategy of planting roots in Bengaluru to court engineers rather than starting with a pure policy outpost in the capital is smart. It plays right into Claude's strongest moat: coding performance.

However, the monetization bottleneck remains real. While a 572% spike in consumer spend sounds massive, $195,000 in monthly app revenue is still a drop in the bucket compared to the $2.5 million spent by US users in the same month. Furthermore, Reliance is notoriously pragmatic, having already inked AI deals with Google and Meta, so Anthropic will need to offer compelling local value to seal a lasting alliance.