Anthropic Mulls Deal With Reliance To Deepen India Presence

Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic is reportedly exploring a partnership with homegrown conglomerate Reliance Industries (RIL) to deepen its presence in India. 

Sources told Techcrunch that Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei will meet Mukesh Ambani and other senior RIL executives during his visit to India later this week. As per the report, the two companies have been in discussions for “some time” over a potential partnership to expand access to its Claude AI assistant in India.

While the details are scarce, the potential deal could mirror rival Perplexity’s move, which partnered with Airtel to offer Pro subscription for free to the telecom giant’s users in the country. 

Anthropic is popularly known for its Claude chatbot.

As per the report, Anthropic has also chosen Bengaluru as the city for its first office in India. Amodei will reportedly announce the opening of the office in the city on Thursday. He will also visit New Delhi to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other senior government officials during the trip. 

Amodei will reportedly be accompanied by the company’s lead for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Guillaume Princen and Anthropic’s head of startups Daniel Delaney.

Meanwhile, sources also reportedly said that Anthropic is witnessing its largest usage coming from India. With its office in Bengaluru, the company plans to target developers and startups.

With this, the AI company plans to tap into India’s 80 Cr internet users and build curated offerings for its second largest market by web traffic. 

The development comes at a time when AI is witnessing rapid adoption across the country. As a result, all major AI companies are making a beeline for India and setting up offices in the country. 

Earlier this year, rival OpenAI said that it would set up its office in Delhi later this year. The company recently appointed former Coursera MD Raghav Gupta to lead its education vertical for India and Asia Pacific, and former Meta marketing lead Sheeladitya Mohanty as marketing head for India. 

The Sam Altman-led company has also struck multiple partnerships with the education ministry and recently rolled out ChatGPT Go in India at INR 399 per month. On the other hand, Perplexity has partnered with Airtel to roll out its services while Google is offering its Gemini Pro subscription for free to local students. 

Meanwhile, The Centre is pushing the pedal on building an indigenous large language model (LLM). Under the IndiaAI Mission, the government has selected local startups like SarvamAI, Soket AI and Gnani.ai to build Indic AI models.

In total, the Centre plans to set up 600 data labs and deploy 38,000 GPUs at affordable rates to accelerate AI research and innovation. 

Meanwhile, RIL, which is in talks with Anthropic, partnered with big tech giants like Google and Meta earlier this year to build AI infrastructure and enterprise solutions through its new unit, Reliance Intelligence. 

At the heart of all this is India’s growing GenAI ecosystem, which is projected to become a $17 Bn opportunity by 2030.