Anthropic Plans India Expansion, To Hire Country Lead Amid Global Push

Anthropic, an AI company, is increasing its presence across the globe, and is considering recruiting a country head for India. The transfer is part of an overall strategy in hiring leaders in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Singapore, and intensifying its operation in Europe and the UK.

India emerges as second-largest market

India accounts for 7.2% of global usage of Anthropic’s Claude AI, making it the company’s second-largest market after the US, which holds a 21.6% share. It has already become a priority market due to the increasing enterprise demand for AI tools in India, and there are plans to establish the first Asian office of Anthropic in Tokyo.

Geographical growth 

Anthropic hopes to hire three times the number of employees abroad in 2021 and grow its team of applied AI 5x. More than 100 new roles are being created in Dublin, London, and Zurich, with additional offices planned across Europe. Chris Ciauri, recently appointed as Managing Director of International, is leading this expansion.

Competition with OpenAI and big tech rivals

The expansion comes at a time of rising competition. OpenAI is preparing to establish its India office in Delhi later this year and has rolled out initiatives such as the OpenAI Learning Accelerator with the Ministry of Education and AICTE. Microsoft and Google are other key players and are also intensifying their AI penetration in Asia. 

India, as well as the global entrants, is investing in Indian AI ecosystems. The government, under the IndiaAI Mission, is establishing 600 data labs and intends to install 38,000 GPUs to speed up the research. Native startups like Soket AI, SarvamAI, and Gnani.ai are creating native AI models, and organisations like Tech Mahindra and the BharatGen consortium at IIT Bombay have been charged with the creation of large language models.