Anthropic has named Irina Ghose, former managing director of Microsoft India, to head its India operations as it prepares to open an office in Bengaluru.
The appointment brings a senior operator with long-standing ties to Indian enterprises and government into the picture.
Ghose spent 24 years at Microsoft, where she worked across banking, healthcare, manufacturing and the public sector, before stepping down in December 2025.
Her arrival points to Anthropic aiming beyond mass consumer reach and into large organisations that demand reliability at scale.
India is already important to Anthropic. It is the second-largest user base for Claude, with activity driven largely by work-related and technical use.
While the audience is large, turning daily use into steady income has proved harder. Pricing pressure is tough, and competitors have leaned heavily on discounts and free access to win ground.
OpenAI has taken a similar path. In late 2025, it incorporated OpenAI India Private Limited and opened a New Delhi office, cementing India as its biggest market outside the United States.
Earlier, it rolled out ChatGPT Go at under $5, then waived fees for a year in a bid to accelerate adoption. These have changed expectations around price and access across the market.
Appfigures data shows downloads of its Claude app in India rose 48% year on year to about 767,000 installs in September. Consumer spending jumped sharply to $195,000 for the month, yet that figure still trails far behind the $2.5 million recorded in the U.S. over the same period. Scale is there. Revenue remains the harder test.
The company has been laying the foundation well before this hire. Chief executive Dario Amodei visited India in October, meeting business leaders and lawmakers, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Talks also explored a possible distribution tie-up with Reliance Industries, though Reliance later chose to partner with Google to offer Gemini AI Pro free to Jio subscribers. Airtel, meanwhile, struck its own deal with Perplexity, folding premium access into mobile plans.
In India, telecom operators have become the gatekeepers. Control the network, and you control how new digital services reach hundreds of millions of people.
In a LinkedIn post announcing her move, Ghose said she would focus on working with Indian enterprises, developers and startups using Claude for “mission-critical” work.
She described demand for “high-trust, enterprise-grade AI” and added that tools adapted to local languages could be a “force multiplier” in sectors such as education and healthcare.
The timing also aligns with the India AI Impact Summit 2026, scheduled for February 19–20 at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. Billed as the first global summit of its kind hosted in the Global South, it will bring together policymakers and executives from firms including Google DeepMind, Adobe and Anthropic to debate deployment, regulation and inclusion.
Despite heavy interest, India’s homegrown ecosystem is still at an early stage. The country has no shortage of software talent or users, yet few firms are building core systems at the very top end. Investment has flowed instead into applications that sit on top of existing platforms, avoiding the cost and risk of building from scratch.
Anthropic is now hiring locally, advertising roles across enterprise sales, startups and partnerships. This means it is focusing on strong local leadership, careful pricing and the right distribution allies to turn India’s surge in usage into a lasting business.
