India Country Brief: The Anthropic Economic Index

India, already the world’s largest exporter of IT services, is home to one of the world’s fastest-growing AI user bases. Understanding how AI is being used in India—and how it differs from other countries—is essential for informing AI policy, investment, and deployment in the country. This brief provides insights on Claude.ai use in India, drawing on data from the fourth Anthropic Economic Index report covering ~1 million Claude.ai conversations globally during November 2025. India accounts for 5.8% of total Claude.ai use, second only to the United States. Yet current adoption remains concentrated, pointing to significant opportunities to expand access more broadly across the population.

The findings point to a user base that applies AI more heavily in professional contexts, delegates more autonomy to it, and brings Claude tasks that are substantially more time-consuming to complete without assistance. Higher shares of complex tasks that humans could not complete alone suggest that Indian users are using the technology at the frontier.

India ranks second among all countries by share of total Claude.ai use, trailing only the United States. However, on a per-capita basis, adjusting for the working-age population, India ranks 101st out of 116 countries with sufficient observation volume, below other countries in Asia such as Singapore or Malaysia. This gap suggests that India’s high Claude use overall reflects the sheer size of its population, not that the average person is using Claude heavily. This points to significant opportunities to increase adoption.

Our latest Economic Index report introduces “economic primitives”—fundamental measurements of how humans and AI collaborate. Comparing India to the global average reveals several distinctive patterns.

Greater productivity speedup. Indian users take on average 14.8 minutes to complete tasks with AI that would take 3.8 hours without AI—a 15x speedup. Globally, users take on average 15.4 minutes to complete tasks that would take 3.1 hours without AI—a 12x speedup. This suggests that AI is delivering outsized productivity gains on the more complex tasks Indian users bring to it.

India ranks 1st globally in the share of AI use devoted to software-related tasks (45.2% of all O*NET-mapped tasks), ahead of Vietnam (42.1%) and Egypt (39.2%). The presence of educational tasks among the most common individual tasks (see Table 1) and when aggregating tasks to occupation groups (see Figure 3) indicates other common use cases in learning and instruction.

Use is concentrated in a small number of highly economically active states. Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Delhi together account for over half of India’s total Claude.ai use. This pattern closely mirrors India’s IT sector geography and urban economic output.

The concentration in these four states—home to Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, and Delhi NCR—suggests that current AI adoption is driven primarily by India’s established technology workforce rather than broad-based consumer uptake.

The occupational mix of Indian Claude.ai use, inferred by mapping tasks to related occupations, skews towards software development and engineering roles, consistent with the country’s large IT services sector.