India is the second-largest market for Anthropic’s Claude AI by overall usage, but ranks near the bottom globally when that usage is adjusted for the size of its working-age population. The finding highlights how adoption of the chatbot remains limited to a relatively small section of users in the country — and India’s per-capita income may have a role to play.

According to Anthropic’s latest Economic Index, India ranks 101st among 116 countries in Claude usage per working-age person. The gap between India’s high aggregate usage and its low per-capita ranking suggests that the country’s position as one of Claude’s biggest markets is driven largely by its population size, rather than widespread adoption of the AI tool across workers and consumers. “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,” Anthropic said.

As of 2025, India’s per capita income is $2,702 (Rs 2,58,548) per year. For reference, the per capita income of Bangladesh is $2,597 while that of Sri Lanka is around $5,000. The US has a per capita income of around $90,000.

Snapshot of India’s AI use

The findings point to a broader challenge for AI adoption in India, where access to and use of advanced AI tools remains uneven despite the country’s large technology workforce and the government’s push to expand domestic AI capabilities.

Anthropic’s analysis shows that higher-income countries generally record greater Claude usage per person, with factors such as income, access to digital infrastructure and awareness of AI tools likely influencing adoption.

“Globally, per-capita AI adoption is strongly correlated with per-capita income. India’s per-capita use is consistent with what this relationship would predict. Without addressing structural barriers related to income, digital infrastructure, and awareness outside the IT sector, Indian AI adoption is likely to remain concentrated,” it added.

The data also suggests that Claude’s use in India is currently more closely linked to professional and technical work than broad-based consumer adoption. This could limit the extent to which productivity gains from generative AI spread across sectors, particularly outside technology-heavy occupations and major economic centres.

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It is worth noting that Anthropic’s analysis is based on Claude usage and may not be a measure of overall AI adoption in India, though it is one of the most popular AI companies in the world.

The Indian states using Claude

Claude use in India is concentrated in a few economically high-performing states. Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Delhi together account for over half of India’s total Claude use — and “this pattern closely mirrors India’s IT sector geography and urban economic output,” the company said.

“The concentration in these four states—home to Bengaluru, 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,” it said.

The primary reasons that Indians are using Claude also reflect that gap. Anthropic said 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. “Broadening AI’s economic impact will require looking beyond software and IT services,” it added.

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The most common O*NET tasks, which are specific, occupation-focused work activities that describe what a worker actually does on the job, performed by Indian users show that a significant portion of them use Claude AI to modify existing software, followed by those who use it to write new programmes, and design websites.

In fact, 45.2% of tasks map to software-related occupations, the highest share of any country.

Claude is helping Indians work faster

Anthropic said that Indian users take, on average, 14.8 minutes to complete tasks with AI that would take 3.8 hours without AI — a 15x speedup. Around 51.3% of Indian users’ Claude.ai use is work-related, compared to 46% globally. Coursework accounts for 20.9% (vs. 19.3% globally) and personal use for 27.8% (vs. 34.7% globally), the company said.

Indian users were also found to delegate more decision-making autonomy to AI (3.60 vs. 3.38 globally on a 1–5 scale, where 1 means no delegation and 5 means extreme delegation). This suggests greater willingness to let AI operate independently rather than using it purely as an assistant, with data also showing that Indian users more frequently bring tasks to AI that they could not easily accomplish independently.

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“Higher autonomy scores, longer baseline task times, and frequent use for tasks humans could do alone suggest that Indian professionals are trusting AI to make decisions and using it to enhance human capabilities,” Anthropic said.