American AI’s Next Stop? India.

American AI's Next Stop? India. THE BELAMY Weekly Newsletter of AIM Monday, Oct 13, 2025 | By Mohit Pandey Now, subscribe to our Digital & Print Editions > When the US was tightening H-1B rules and making it harder for Indians to move there, American tech firms were quietly doing the opposite—moving here instead. What started as outsourcing decades ago has now turned into something bigger. India is fast becoming ground zero for American AI companies.  OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity AI, following ElevenLabs' moves to India, are planning to set up offices here. These companies are drawn not just by the market, but also by India's deep pool of engineers, researchers and developers. So, What's Been Happening? Anthropic has chosen Bengaluru for its India office, which is expected to open in early 2026. CEO Dario Amodei is currently in India, meeting government officials, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as part of the company's regional expansion.  He's also reportedly in talks with Reliance Industries and attending a dinner hosted by Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani. Over the weekend, Anthropic hosted its first developer event in Bengaluru with Accel. The invite-only AI Dev Day gathered CTOs, founders and product heads to explore its newly launched Claude Sonnet 4.5. OpenAI is setting up shop too, choosing Delhi for its India office. The focus, however, is different. Unlike Anthropic, which is investing in R&D, OpenAI's office will handle government relations and enterprise sales.  The company has already started localising its product strategy—introducing ChatGPT Go, an India-only plan at ₹399 per month, improving Indic language support in GPT-5, and launching an education partnership with IIT Madras and AICTE to bring ChatGPT into classrooms. Meanwhile, Perplexity AI, founded by Chennai-born Aravind Srinivas, is already leading the Indian market. A significant partnership with Bharti Airtel, offering free one-year subscriptions to 360 million users, helped Perplexity become the top app on India's iOS store.  ElevenLabs is joining the list as well. CEO Mati Staniszewski, who was part of the UK's largest trade mission to India, revealed that India is now the company's number one market in signups and second in enterprise revenue. Meanwhile, local partners like Meesho are automating 60,000 support calls daily in Hindi and English, while Cars24 is resolving issues 50% faster through 20,000 multilingual conversations every month.   [Must Watch] AIM Network Exclusive >> Cerebras has just raised $1.1 billion to take on NVIDIA and redefine the global AI infrastructure race, and India is central to its plan. In an exclusive interaction, Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman breaks down why wafer-scale chips, not GPUs, represent the future of inference, and how India could become the global hub for sovereign, energy-efficient AI compute. [Event Alert] Happy Llama is back! Happy Llama 2026 is expanding its footprint. What began as India's most dynamic AI-startup summit now bridges continents—uniting founders, investors and innovators through twin editions in Bengaluru and San Francisco. [Event Alert] Happy Llama is back! Happy Llama 2026 is expanding its footprint. What began as India's most dynamic AI-startup summit now bridges continents—uniting founders, investors and innovators through twin editions in Bengaluru and San Francisco. And while we count down to Happy Llama 2026, L&T Finance (LTF) has launched 'Pitch Point', a competition for AI startups in the run-up to RAISE'25—a premier AI event for the BFSI sector in the country. The contest aims to identify and back early to growth-stage startups that are building AI products for the BFSI and non-BFSI sectors. Click here to find out more.    Back to Anthropic and OpenAI: Why are They Coming to India? "It's not about access to users. It's about access to talent," said Gaurav Vasu, CEO of UnearthInsight. "All of them have business interests here, but their immediate focus is research and development." India is already the world's second-largest hub for R&D talent, after the US. Anthropic's upcoming GCC in Bengaluru will focus on advanced AI research and product localisation. "They are all coming here for AI, analytics and domain talent," Vasu said. The data tells the same story. According to the Anthropic Economic Index report, India ranks second in Claude's global usage, with the majority coming from developers and coders. Companies like CRED are already using Claude for production-level code. Karnataka IT minister Priyank Kharge called Anthropic's arrival a boost for local R&D. "Bengaluru now ranks fifth globally in AI and deep-tech ecosystems and has over 1,00,000 AI professionals," he said. Sanchit Vir Gogia of Greyhound Research said roughly one in four developers building agentic AI systems now work from India. "They form a distributed R&D network—running small automations that collectively train global models," he explained. The timing aligns neatly with India's broader tech ambitions.  Prime Minister Modi's meetings with Amodei and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon this week highlight India's growing weight in global AI strategy. Amon too echoed the sentiment after his meeting. "We are encouraged by the opportunities to develop an Indian ecosystem across AI smartphones, PCs, smart glasses, auto, industrial and more," he wrote. At the same time, India is also pushing for sovereign tech products, evident in its backing of Zoho's suite of products. How the country balances global AI giants with domestic innovation will be one of the most intriguing storylines to watch in the years ahead.    [Must Watch from AIM Network] Agentic payments are here in India. In this video, AIM Network explores how Razorpay, NPCI and OpenAI have teamed up to bring UPI-powered payments directly into ChatGPT, making AI-powered commerce a reality. So, are There Any Risks? The growth is exciting, but Indian AI startups have a different story. While this shift has direct spillover benefits—more jobs, more research investment and faster innovation—it also puts pressure on Indian IT and AI startups to keep pace. Over the last year, a new sentiment has taken root—the 'Skip India Movement'. Many startups are forced to seek customers abroad as Indian enterprises remain hesitant to pay for their services.  And then comes the question of infrastructure. India's regulatory push on data localisation has attracted interest from OpenAI, which is reportedly exploring a massive 1 GW 'Stargate' data centre in the country. TCS has made a similar announcement—a 1 GW AI data centre for Indian enterprises and startups.  However, for this, TCS would require an investment of over $6 billion over the next five years, a pace that might prove to be a bit too slow. Meanwhile, the government's IndiaAI Mission has been working to build Indian foundational models for the last year. So far, it has selected a total of 12 startups and deployed as many as 40,000 GPUs, though many of these are still in the pipeline, not yet active.  How this will pan out for Anthropic and OpenAI is clear: more R&D and more talent. From India, the message is equally clear: it doesn't just want to be a market for global AI, it wants to build it.  Now, subscribe to our Digital & Print Editions > For Brand collaborations, reply to this email or write to info@aim.media You received this email because you signed up to the updates from AIM. Click here to unsubscribe if you do not want to receive emails from us. Sent via