Anthropic Hires Former Microsoft India MD to Lead Push into Key Growth Market

New updates have been reported about Anthropic.

Anthropic has named former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose to head its India operations as it prepares to open a Bengaluru office, marking a decisive move to convert the country’s fast-growing user base into a meaningful enterprise and consumer business. Ghose, who spent 24 years at Microsoft before leaving in late 2025, brings deep local experience and senior-level relationships across corporates and government, giving Anthropic a high-caliber operator to drive go-to-market execution, regulatory engagement, and ecosystem partnerships in what has become one of its most strategically important geographies. India is already Anthropic’s second-largest market for Claude usage, skewed heavily toward technical and work-related tasks such as software development, but monetization remains nascent: Claude app downloads in India rose 48% year over year in September to about 767,000, while monthly consumer spend surged 572% to $195,000—still a fraction of the roughly $2.5 million spent in the U.S. that month, underscoring both the growth runway and the pricing pressure in India’s price-sensitive market.

Anthropic is responding by building a local presence, recruiting startup and enterprise account executives and a partner sales manager, and positioning Claude as “high-trust, enterprise-grade AI” for mission-critical use cases across sectors such as education and healthcare, including future localization for Indian languages. CEO Dario Amodei’s recent visit to India, including meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and senior business leaders, highlights the company’s top-level focus on the market, even as it navigates a distribution landscape where telecom operators have emerged as critical gatekeepers and have already aligned with rival AI platforms. Anthropic previously explored a tie-up with Reliance Industries before the conglomerate partnered with Google, while competitor collaborations such as Bharti Airtel’s deal with Perplexity illustrate the intensifying race for consumer access and bundling. Against this backdrop, Anthropic’s India strategy centers on enterprise adoption, developer engagement, and targeted local partnerships rather than pure volume, aiming to translate surging usage into durable, higher-value revenue streams as India positions itself as a global AI hub ahead of the AI Impact Summit 2026.