India has suddenly become the new hotspot for global AI startups. OpenAI, Perplexity AI, and Anthropic are all planning to set up offices here, signalling that the country is now central to the strategy.
While OpenAI has set its sights on Delhi, Anthropic has zeroed in on Bengaluru for its India office, expected to open early 2026. This week, CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei is in India, meeting government officials and enterprise partners as part of Anthropic’s regional expansion. He is reportedly also meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and connecting with Reliance Industries, a strategy OpenAI appears to be pursuing as well.
Reports suggest Nandan Nilekani, chairman of Infosys, is set to host a dinner in the city for Amodei and a select group of startup founders.
Anthropic will also host its first developer event in Bengaluru on October 11 in partnership with Accel. The invite-only AI Dev Day will bring together CTOs, product leaders, and founders to explore Anthropic’s newly launched Claude Sonnet 4.5.
The trend extends beyond Anthropic, with other AI companies showing keen interest in India. ElevenLabs CEO and co-founder Mati Staniszewski also recently visited India. He said the country is becoming increasingly important in the voice-first digital space, with about one-third of internet users using voice search every month—the highest rate globally.
Why India?
India is emerging as one of the fastest-growing markets for these startups.
Staniszewski said that over the past year, India became the company’s number one market by signups and second by enterprise revenue. “Partners in the conversational AI space, like Meesho, are automating around 60,000 support calls a day in Hindi and English, while Cars24 is resolving issues roughly 50% faster, handling some 20,000 multilingual conversations each month,” he added.
According to Anthropic’s Economic Index Report, India ranks second globally in consumer usage of Claude, behind the United States. A large share of usage in India is for technical and programming-related tasks such as mobile UI development and web app debugging. Indian companies like CRED use Claude for critical coding work.
Indian Talent
Gaurav Vasu, founder and CEO of UnearthInsight, told AIM that the new wave of global AI expansion into India is driven largely by R&D, talent, and innovation rather than pure market access.
“All of them have business interests in India, but their immediate focus is research and development,” said Vasu.
Despite India’s appeal as a large market, R&D remains the real draw. Anthropic, for instance, is preparing to set up a Global Capability Centre (GCC) in Bangalore focused on advanced AI research and product localisation.
“They are all coming here for rich AI, analytics, and domain talent,” Vasu said. “India is already the second-largest hub for R&D talent in the world, after the US.”
Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO of GreyHound Research, told AIM that nearly one in four global developers experimenting with agentic architectures now operates from India. They form a distributed R&D network, running small, domain-specific automations that collectively provide millions of structured prompts and corrections.
Highlighting Bengaluru’s rise as an AI hub, Karnataka IT minister Priyank Kharge noted the city’s fifth-place global ranking in AI and deep-tech ecosystems and its pool of more than 100,000 AI professionals. “Anthropic’s arrival will further expand opportunities for local talent, R&D, and AI product development,” he said in a post on X.
India produces a vast number of engineers and computer scientists. According to the Stanford AI Index 2024, India has the highest penetration of AI skills. AI talent concentration in India has grown by 263% since 2016, positioning the country as a major AI hub.
Besides that, Indian engineers have powered many global tech projects, and wages and operating costs are generally lower than in the US or Europe. While cost advantages continue to make India attractive, Vasu stressed that innovation and contextual relevance are now the main motivators.
“There are only three big drivers for setting up R&D centres—cost, talent, and building India-specific solutions,” he said. “Indian talent understands what Indian enterprises need. They will build India-specific products from their GCCs.”
Comparing Strategies
While both OpenAI and Anthropic have India on their radar, their approaches differ. Vasu clarified that OpenAI’s New Delhi office will primarily handle sales and strategic engagement, including government relations, rather than research and development.
Alongside its Delhi office, OpenAI is making moves to localise its product strategy. It introduced ChatGPT Go, an India-only subscription tier priced at just ₹399 per month. The company has improved support for Indic languages in GPT-5 and launched the OpenAI Learning Accelerator, a multilateral initiative with IIT Madras, AICTE, and the Education Ministry to deploy ChatGPT in schools and colleges.
According to Gogia, India’s diverse digital population generates rich data that improves AI model performance. But he cautioned that global firms must tread carefully due to tightening data-sovereignty rules and the forthcoming Digital India Act. “OpenAI and Anthropic are therefore forming local partnerships with Reliance, Jio, and Indian startups to ensure lawful access to compute and contextual datasets,” Gogia said.
On infrastructure, OpenAI is considering a Stargate AI data centre in India, reportedly a 1 GW facility under construction.
Meanwhile, Chennai-born CEO Aravind Srinivas revealed that India is now Perplexity’s single largest market by user base. This surge followed Perplexity’s landmark partnership with Bharti Airtel, which in mid-2025 offered its 360 million subscribers free one-year Perplexity Pro subscriptions
That deal immediately made Perplexity number 1 on India’s iOS App Store, as millions of users adopted its AI-powered search. According to Perplexity, about 45 million Indian visitors used its service in August 2025, versus 25 million from the entire US.
The rapid entry of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity will boost India’s AI ecosystem. Locally, it means thousands of high-end tech jobs, increased R&D investment, and a spillover of expertise. It also pressures Indian startups and IT firms to upgrade their AI capabilities, either by collaborating with these giants or by developing competitive products.
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