Anthropic reveals India is Claude AI's No. 2 market. But what are Indians actually using the AI for? | WION Decodes
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Anthropic reveals India is Claude AI's No. 2 market. But what are Indians actually using the AI for? | WION Decodes")
India is quietly becoming an AI superpower—but there's a catch Photograph: (Combination created using images from AFP and Pexels)
Anthropic's latest Economic Index has found that India accounts for 5.8% of global Claude AI usage—second only to the US. But what are they using it for? The answer may surprise you.
Anthropic, the tech firm behind Claude AI, has revealed that India has quietly become one of the world's biggest AI users. India, according to Anthropic's latest Economic Index, which analysed nearly one million Claude.ai conversations globally, India now accounts for 5.8 per cent of all Claude usage, second only to the United States.
But what are they using the AI for? Indians aren't asking AI to write poems or plan holidays. They're asking it to write code, solve complex problems and save hours of work.
How many Indians are using the technology?
India may be the world's second-largest Claude market, yet the average Indian still isn't using AI very much. Instead, usage is heavily concentrated among software professionals in a handful of technology hubs.
The report offers one of the clearest snapshots yet of who is using AI in India, what they're asking it to do, and why India's AI story looks very different from the rest of the world.
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India is quietly becoming an AI superpower—but there's a catch Photograph: (Combination created using images from AFP and Pexels)
India is No. 2 globally... but 101st per person
This is perhaps the report's biggest surprise. India contributes 5.8 per cent of all Claude conversations globally, yet when adjusted for population, India falls to 101st out of 116 countries.
That means India's AI boom isn't being driven by widespread adoption. It's being driven by scale. What it means is that India isn't yet an AI-first society. It's an AI-heavy professional economy. So, which states are using AI the most?
Four states dominate India's AI use
AI adoption isn't spread evenly across the country. More than half of India's Claude usage comes from just four places:
Maharashtra (15.5 per cent)
Tamil Nadu (13.2 per cent)
Karnataka (12.7 per cent)
Delhi (10.5 per cent)
These are also India's biggest IT and services hubs, home to cities such as Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi NCR.
The geography tells its own story. Rather than becoming a mass consumer technology, AI today appears to be an extension of India's existing software industry.
So what are Indians actually asking AI to do?
While AIs like Elon Musk's Grok have dominated headlines for its use to create nude, stripped-down images of young girls and women, Indians aren't using Claude AI for something that nefarious. Indians are overwhelmingly using the AI to write software.
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According to Anthropic, 45.2 per cent of all AI-related occupational tasks in India are software-related. That's the highest share anywhere in the world.
India even ranks ahead of Vietnam and Egypt in the proportion of AI use devoted to programming and software engineering.
Education is the second major use case, with students increasingly relying on AI for learning, explanations and coursework. By contrast, relatively fewer Indians use Claude for casual or personal purposes compared with the global average.
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India is quietly becoming an AI superpower—but there's a catch Photograph: (Combination created using images from AFP and Pexels)
AI is saving Indians nearly four hours of work
One statistic stands out above almost every other. The average task Indian users give Claude would normally take 3.8 hours to complete.
With AI? The task just takes 14.8 minutes. That's roughly a 15-fold productivity boost. Globally, the average improvement is around 12 times faster.
This suggests Indian users aren't giving AI simple jobs. They're bringing complex, time-consuming work and using AI to compress hours into minutes.
Indians trust AI more than the rest of the world
The report also found Indian users are more willing to let AI make decisions on their behalf.
Anthropic measures something it calls AI autonomy, essentially how much responsibility users hand over to the model. India scored 3.60 out of 5, compared with the global average of 3.38.
In practical terms, that means Indian users are more likely to ask AI to independently generate code, solve problems or complete substantial portions of work, rather than simply acting as an assistant.
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Many Indians are using AI for things they couldn't do themselves
Another revealing finding concerns human capability. Globally, nearly 88 per cent of AI tasks could theoretically have been completed by the user without AI. In India, that figure drops to 84.6 per cent.
It may sound like a small difference, but it suggests Indian users are more frequently turning to AI for genuinely difficult tasks, including programming in unfamiliar languages, solving technical problems or tackling work beyond their existing expertise.
In other words, in India, AI isn't just replacing effort. It's expanding capability.
Good prompts really do matter
One of the report's most interesting observations concerns prompting. Anthropic found a strong relationship between the sophistication of a user's prompt and the quality of the AI's response.
Indian users ranked among the top 10 per cent globally in the complexity of AI-generated outputs they received.
That doesn't necessarily mean Indians are better prompt engineers. But it does suggest many are asking AI sophisticated, work-oriented questions that produce equally sophisticated answers.
