India Brief Economic Index

India Country Brief: The Anthropic Economic Index \ Anthropic Economic Research India Country Brief: The Anthropic Economic Index Feb 16, 2026

Executive summary 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 is among the leading countries in global AI adoption 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. Figure 1. Top 20 countries by share of global Claude.ai use. India accounts for 5.8% of global Claude.ai consumer use, second only to the United States. Bars show each country’s share of total conversations observed November 13–20, 2025. India highlighted in blue; N = 975, 160 conversations globally.

Concentrated use within India Geographic concentration 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. Figure 2. Share of India's Claude.ai use by state. Map shows each state’s share of India’s total Claude.ai use. Top states: Maharashtra (15.5%), Tamil Nadu (13.2%), Karnataka (12.7%), Delhi (10.5%). Gray regions indicate insufficient data. November 2025 data. Shapefile for the map from Natural Earth.

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. Concentration of occupational tasks 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. Figure 3. Occupation groups in India by Claude.ai use. Horizontal bars show the share of Indian Claude.ai use attributable to each SOC occupation group. Orange markers indicate the global average for comparison. November 2025 data. The most common O*NET tasks performed by Indian users confirm the software-heavy profile: Table 1. Most common O*NET tasks among Claude use in India. Some task names shortened for readability. 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. Economic primitives: how India uses AI differently

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. Figure 4. Comparing India's Claude.ai use to the global average. The panels compare India (N = 58,098) against the global average (N = 975,160) across nine economic primitives. November 2025 data.

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. Stronger work orientation. 51.3% of Indian 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 work-heavy, lower-personal-use profile is consistent with India’s large professional services sector and the finding from the main report that lower-GDP-per-capita countries tend towards work and coursework over personal use. Higher AI autonomy. Indian users 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. Lower human-only ability. One of the data points we measure is whether AI is being used to do something a human couldn’t do on their own, like writing code in a language they don’t know. We find that 84.6% of tasks could be completed by a human alone (vs. 87.9% globally), suggesting Indian users more frequently bring tasks to AI that they could not easily accomplish independently. Prompting skills matter. As a proxy for the skills humans and AI bring to the conversation, we estimate the years of education someone would need to understand the user prompt or the AI response in a conversation. We find that the human education level of prompts (12.2 years) and AI education level of responses (12.5 years) are relatively similar, mirroring a global pattern where input quality shapes output quality. Comparing country averages for AI education, India ranks in the top 10%, indicating Indian users are getting…