Anthropic has named Irina Ghose, previously the managing director of Microsoft India, to head its operations in India. This strategic hire comes as the American artificial intelligence firm readies itself to establish a physical office in Bengaluru. The decision highlights India's rising significance as a crucial expansion frontier for AI companies seeking substantial growth opportunities outside the United States.

Ghose brings extensive experience from a major technology corporation to her new position. After a 24-year career at Microsoft, she departed in December 2025. Her recruitment provides Anthropic with an executive who possesses established connections with local businesses and government entities, which will be vital as the company builds its presence in one of the globe's most rapidly expanding AI markets.

India has emerged as a market of paramount strategic importance for Anthropic. The country is already the second-largest user base for its AI assistant, Claude, with application usage strongly oriented toward technical and professional activities like software development. This expansion occurs as Anthropic's main competitor, OpenAI, is also increasing its focus on India, with plans to open an office in New Delhi. This parallel move indicates that India is quickly becoming a fiercely contested arena in the worldwide competition to commercialize generative AI.

While India presents immense scale, with over a billion internet subscribers and more than 700 million smartphone users, transforming this vast reach into significant revenue has been challenging. This difficulty is prompting AI firms to test aggressive pricing strategies and promotional offers. For instance, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Go last year, a subscription plan priced under five dollars targeted at Indian users, and later offered it free for a year in the country.

Similar market dynamics are evident for Anthropic. Data from Appfigures shows that in September, downloads of the Claude app in India rose by 48% compared to the previous year, reaching approximately 767,000 installations. Consumer spending for the month also saw a dramatic increase of 572%, totaling $195,000. However, this figure remains modest when contrasted with the United States, where spending for the same period reached $2.5 million.

Anthropic has been intensifying its high-level engagement in India. CEO Dario Amodei visited in October, meeting with corporate leaders and policymakers, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to discuss the company's growth plans and the increasing adoption of its tools. In the telecom sector, Reliance ultimately entered an agreement with Google to provide its Gemini AI Pro plan at no cost to Jio subscribers. Concurrently, rival Bharti Airtel partnered with Perplexity to include access to its premium subscription, demonstrating how India's major telecom operators have become essential gatekeepers for distributing and scaling consumer AI services.

In a LinkedIn post announcing her appointment, Ghose stated her focus would be on collaborating with Indian enterprises, developers, and startups that are implementing Claude for "mission-critical" applications. She pointed to rising demand for what she termed "high-trust, enterprise-grade AI." Ghose also suggested that AI systems adapted for local languages could act as a "force multiplier" in sectors such as education and healthcare, signaling Anthropic's ambition to extend adoption beyond early technology users to larger institutions and the public sector.

This concerted push by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Perplexity is unfolding as India's domestic generative AI ecosystem is still in a relatively nascent stage. Although the nation boasts a deep reservoir of software talent and a quickly growing base of AI users, it has generated few startups focused on building large foundation models. Investors have predominantly funded companies operating at the application layer, rather than committing the enormous capital typically required to train cutting-edge AI systems.

Ghose's appointment also precedes the AI Impact Summit 2026, scheduled for February in India. The government is expected to convene AI startups, global chief executives, and industry specialists at this event to deliberate on the next stage of AI deployment nationally. The summit is a component of New Delhi's wider initiative to demonstrate support for local AI development and establish India as a significant contender in the global AI landscape, especially as competition escalates across major markets.

Anthropic is concurrently expanding its team in India, with job postings for positions such as startup and enterprise account executives and a partner sales manager. This recruitment drive signals a concerted effort to strengthen its market entry strategy and engage Indian businesses and startups as customers while it grows its footprint in the country.

For Anthropic, hiring Ghose adds senior local leadership at a pivotal time. The company aims to convert India's soaring user engagement into a sustainable business, navigating a complex market where success will be shaped by distribution partnerships, competitive pricing pressures, and the pace of enterprise adoption. These factors will ultimately determine which AI players achieve long-term victory in this critical region.