Anthropic is preparing to set up an office in India and is considering a partnership with Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries that would plug the Claude AI maker into one of the planet’s fastest-scaling digital economies. The mooted outpost will have its anchor settled in Bengaluru but will be focused on developers and startups, not just a sales-and-policy footprint.
The strategy is informed by two truths: India now has more than a billion internet subscribers, and it has emerged as one of Claude’s most engaged markets. Digital intelligence company Similarweb suggests India contributes the second-largest component of visits to Claude’s website after the U.S., indicating a high level of top-of-funnel interest that Anthropic wants to convert into paying usage and enterprise deals.
Why India Is Climbing in Anthropic’s Playbook
New app data highlights the opportunity. Claude’s iOS and Android app received around 767,000 installs this year in India, a 48% increase over last year tracked by Appfigures. In India, paid conversion is still nascent in the AI services space and a 572% year-on-year uplift in consumer spending generated approximately $195,000 over one month.
In the United States, the numbers are even bigger — Appfigures said that it had seen a 91 percent year-over-year increase in downloads there and a spike of 604 percent in spending, hitting around $2.5 million in one recent month.
Worldwide, downloads of the app surged 74 percent to about 1.01 million, and spending rose 546 percent to about $5.62 million. India’s trajectory is as important as absolute spend to Anthropic (the growth curve is unyielding, and India has a huge developer community that is becoming increasingly fluent in AI, something industry bodies like NASSCOM and GitHub also cite).
Local supply-side conditions are also on the improve. Big cloud providers and Indian conglomerates are building data centers and AI infrastructure, and enterprises are rolling out pilots for customer service, analytics and coding help. And that’s the mix that plays to models staked on reliability and safety — commitment to which is where Anthropic builds its constitutional AI approach.
Reliance Link Provides Distribution And Data Scale
It could be a game changer to tie up with Reliance Industries. Reliance has set up a focused AI initiative — Reliance Intelligence — and partnered with key technology providers, including existing investors such as Google and Meta, to help build infrastructure and industry solutions. With Jio’s massive national reach of more than 460 million subscribers, Reliance can provide distribution muscle across telecom, cloud, retail and financial services — all the channels where AI assistants can move from pilots to production.
For Anthropic, that collaboration could be bringing Claude applications into the Jio developer platform, embedding AI copilots inside enterprise workflows or even powering consumer-facing experiences within Jio’s consumer apps. The safety-oriented pitch might ring true with regulated industries such as banking, insurance and health care where model guardrails and auditability are influencing outcomes in vendor selections.
Other frontier-model players are also approached by Reliance; an anticipated tie-up with a rival provider has yet to materialize. That opens up an opportunity in which Anthropic is able to compete on enterprise readiness, multi-tenant controls and the breadth of integrations across Reliance’s ecosystem.
Bengaluru-Based Office Prepares For Core Developers, Startups
Other competitors are focusing on a sales-and-policy presence in New Delhi, but Anthropic’s Bengaluru office is built to court builders. You can expect developer relations, direct technical support and ecosystem programs that lower friction for the adoption of Claude models — things like access to credits, SDK workshops or co-marketing with local partners.
Localization is one major test. Companies need data-residency options, stringent content controls and corporate-grade performance for the Indic languages. Although no specifics have been announced yet, there are two more India-specific model evaluations, as well as the deployment of private networks through partner clouds and tooling that make it easier to integrate securely with on-prem or VPC offerings, in the works.
Anthropic has not addressed the plans for the office or a potential Reliance deal publicly, but hiring trends and product momentum in market indicate a move toward more investment.
Crowded Field Tests Pricing And Partnerships
The competitive context is intensifying. OpenAI has explained plans for an India office, and introduced a sub-$5 ChatGPT plan in the country as well — a pricing lever to drive faster conversion in price-conscious segments. Meanwhile, Perplexity signed a deal with Bharti Airtel to offer Perplexity Pro access to over 360 million subscribers for one year as well as fine-tuned features including live earnings call transcripts for Indian stocks to increase engagement.
The bottom line: Price, distribution and localized utility are becoming as important as raw model quality. As India’s digital consumption explodes and enterprise AI budgets go from experimental to line item, Anthropic’s blend of a Bengaluru builder hub, combined with a potential Reliance partnership, could give Claude a stickier landing — if it can deliver the compliance, language coverage and total cost of ownership that comes with operating at India scale.
