Anthropic to open Bengaluru office early 2026 to expand Claude in India
CEO Dario Amodei visiting for government, enterprise and partner engagements including Reliance
Focus on Indic-language improvements, enterprise integrations, and developer tools with IBM
Plans include local hiring, Deloitte alliance, and scaling consumer and enterprise deployments
AI research lab Anthropic said it will open its first office in India in early 2026 and is dispatching CEO Dario Amodei this week to meet government and corporate leaders, Reuters reported.
The office will reportedly be located in Bengaluru and will be Anthropic’s second Asia-Pacific office after Tokyo. It is aimed at scaling local engineering, commercial and partner activities as the company seeks to capitalise on strong Indian demand for its Claude assistant.
The AI start-up behind the Claude family of models said India has become one of its largest consumer markets, with rapid growth in downloads and in-app spending. The company has been offering both free and paid tiers of Claude in India while evaluating local pricing and go-to-market steps.
Executives expect the Bengaluru office to support developer engagement, enterprise sales and strategic partner discussions, including reported talks with Reliance Industries around potential collaboration.
Anthropic is also heavily investing in enhancing Claude’s capabilities in Indic languages, including Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Urdu.
The start-up will reportedly roll out improved Hindi performance for government and enterprise interfaces and train its models on multiple Indic languages to drive adoption among public sector and enterprise users.
IBM & Deloitte Partnership
The India expansion comes amid major enterprise moves for Anthropic. The company announced a strategic partnership with IBM to embed Claude within IBM’s software portfolio, starting with an AI-first integrated development environment (IDE) designed to accelerate the software development lifecycle.
IBM said internal early testing of the IDE produced material productivity gains among early adopters, and the two firms also published a first-of-its-kind framework for building secure enterprise AI agents, a structured Agent Development Lifecycle (ADLC) intended to help large organisations deploy agentic AI under enterprise governance and security controls.
Separately, Anthropic last week expanded its alliance with professional services firm Deloitte, which will roll out Claude across its global network and establish a Claude Centre of Excellence to support deployments, training and compliance features for regulated sectors.
Those deals underscore Anthropic’s strategy of coupling model capabilities with enterprise governance and domain expertise as it competes with rival providers.
Product and Positioning
Anthropic has emphasised safety and controllability as differentiators for Claude, positioning the models as suitable for enterprise use where auditability and guardrails matter.
The company has broadened its model suite (recently releasing models in the Sonnet line) and is pushing into developer tooling and agent design, areas IBM and other partners are packaging for customers that require compliance, security and lifecycle management.
India’s growing appetite for AI tools, from start-ups to large corporates, has attracted several global players. Anthropic faces competition from OpenAI, Google’s Gemini and other regional players that are also expanding their presence.
Anthropic’s consumer metrics cited by industry trackers show a steep year-on-year rise in app downloads and a sharp increase in consumer spending, signalling healthy engagement even as the company refines local pricing and enterprise offerings.
Talent & Scale-Up Plans
Anthropic has been expanding internationally and plans to triple parts of its international workforce to meet demand, executives say.
The Bengaluru office will complement hiring and partner development already underway across the region and should help the company deliver enterprise integrations, local engineering and customer success functions.
Opening an India office marks a strategic step for Anthropic as it moves to convert product traction into commercial and partner-led engagements.
By pairing Claude’s model capabilities with IBM’s enterprise integration and Deloitte’s global deployment muscle, Anthropic is betting it can capture both developer mindshare and regulated-industry business, a dual path that, if successful, would accelerate model adoption across Indian enterprises and start-ups while raising the bar on governance expectations for AI systems.
