Anthropic CEO Says India Central to Enterprise AI Strategy
In a conversation with Nikhil Kamath, Anthropic’s Amodei said partnerships with Indian IT firms will anchor the company’s global enterprise expansion.
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[Image source: Chetan Jha/MITSMR India]
India is increasingly becoming central to Anthropic’s enterprise strategy, and not simply another large market to court.
In a conversation with Zerodha Co-founder Nikhil Kamath, released on Tuesday, 24 February, Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei signaled that the company sees India as a strategic base for scaling AI through partnerships with major IT services firms and conglomerates.
“This is my second visit to India,” Amodei said, recalling meetings last October with leaders across the country’s largest technology firms. “Since then, we’ve begun working with most, if not all, of them.”
The emphasis is deliberate. Anthropic positions itself as an enterprise AI provider rather than a consumer platform company. “Our role is to serve other businesses,” Amodei said.
That stance carries weight in a country whose roughly $315 billion IT services industry is built on systems integration, consulting and large-scale digital transformation.
Generative AI has unsettled that model. Analysts including Goldman Sachs have warned that AI could automate substantial portions of coding, documentation and administrative workflows. Indian IT stocks have reacted sharply at various points to those projections.
Amodei’s framing was measured, though he pushed back against the growing anxiety that AI could replace SaaS platforms or disrupt India’s IT services industry.
AI, he argued, compresses certain technical tasks while elevating others.
To illustrate, he referred to Amdahl’s Law, the idea that in any multi-step process, speeding up some parts makes the remaining slow parts the bottleneck. If software writing becomes dramatically faster, the competitive edge shifts toward integration, regulatory navigation, change management and client trust.
“If we collaborate with a company here, they already understand the Indian market far better than we do,” Amodei said.
Whether it’s consulting, integration, or IT services, Indian firms bring institutional knowledge, sector depth and embedded enterprise relationships that models cannot replicate.
Anthropic’s role, he suggested, is to augment that expertise, not replace it.
Handled correctly, AI could sharpen companies’ go-to-market strategies, deepen domain specialization, and amplify what they already do well. “AI doesn’t have to substitute what they do. It can meaningfully elevate it.”
That perspective also echoes broader industry research.
McKinsey’s recent surveys on generative AI adoption suggest that organizational redesign and execution remain bigger obstacles than model capability. Implementation, not invention, defines the pace of value creation.
Amodei acknowledged that AI’s impact is currently concentrated in digital workflows. Robotics and physical automation continue to advance, though most commercial disruption remains in software, analytics and content-heavy processes.
And even in digital workflows, he argued, something critical remains deeply human: relationships.
Indian IT firms operate through long-standing client partnerships across banking, telecom, manufacturing and government. As AI automates certain technical functions, those relational and institutional strengths could become even more valuable.
“At the end of the day, all of this is meant to serve people,” Amodei said. “There will always be a human-centric element that remains critical.”
Amodei also cited computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton’s prediction that AI would replace radiologists.
AI systems have become highly capable at interpreting scans.
Yet radiologists continue to practice, with greater focus on patient communication, contextual diagnosis and treatment guidance.
The most technical components may be automated, but communication, empathy, and trust remain essential.
For India’s IT firms, the parallel is clear. Coding and routine analysis may become faster and cheaper. Strategic guidance, integration and client management rise in importance.
“This is an empirical question,” Amodei said when asked whether AI could eventually surpass humans across most cognitive tasks.
Companies should base decisions on what AI can actually do today, measure its performance in real use, and adjust as evidence evolves, rather than reacting to sweeping predictions about the future.
