NPCI building AI platform on Claude as India pushes wider enterprise adoption: Anthropic India MD

Mumbai: The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is building its AI platform on Anthropic's Claude, a move that could help expand the adoption of artificial intelligence across India's financial ecosystem, Anthropic India Managing Director Irina Ghose said.

Speaking at a fireside chat on “AI Native Markets: Driving the Next Era of Financial Advantage” at the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai, Ghose said NPCI's AI initiative could create a platform that enables businesses and developers to build and deploy AI-powered solutions across a wider ecosystem.

“Again, NPCI, which is our host, when they are building across AI Next, their platform on Claude, that's a great kind of ensuring that we are solving larger ecosystems, making it centrally available for people to build things which are connectors and getting them lot more pervasive,” Ghose said.

She said India's AI opportunity is closely tied to the country's ability to address problems at population scale, given the diversity of its users and the need to support multiple languages.

“India's complexity lies in the diversity of the population it serves, the scale, the multilingual language that we really have to solve for,” Ghose said.

Ghose said deploying advanced AI capabilities across sectors such as banking, agriculture, education and healthcare could help address challenges beyond individual companies and extend AI applications to the last mile.

“In each of them, it really matters because the minute you kind of try to solve population scale problems by making it available to the last mile, that's where the real difference lies,” she said.

She also stressed the importance of building AI infrastructure and data-processing capabilities within India as enterprise adoption grows.

Ghose said the availability of Anthropic's Claude models through Amazon Bedrock in India would help address enterprise requirements related to data residency, security and governance.

“I would say the need for having data privacy and the need for having data reside within the boundaries was always an ask for the industry. We absolutely want to ensure that the way we are serving the institutions, people in the country, we ensure the data privacy for the data residing in the country,” Ghose said.

The development comes as Indian financial institutions and technology companies increasingly explore agentic AI, in which AI systems can perform tasks with a greater degree of autonomy rather than simply generate responses.

NPCI is also working on an AI-agent framework for payments. Reuters reported on Thursday that NPCI is developing a registry to monitor and verify AI agents carrying out transactions on its payments network, initially focusing on UPI. The move highlights the growing need to establish accountability and safeguards as AI becomes more directly involved in financial transactions.

Anthropic has also expanded its presence in India, with the country emerging as its second-largest market for Claude.ai after the US. The company opened its Bengaluru office in February and has been expanding partnerships across enterprise, education and other sectors.

Ghose had earlier said that the biggest business value of AI lies not merely in improving efficiency or cutting costs, but in helping companies tackle complex problems that were previously difficult to address.

For businesses, the developments point to a broader shift from experimenting with AI towards integrating frontier models into core operations and infrastructure. That shift also brings questions around data protection, security, accountability and human oversight as increasingly capable AI systems are deployed in sensitive sectors.

(ANI)