NPCI builds its AI platform on Claude, says Anthropic India MD

The National Payments Corporation of India is developing its artificial intelligence platform on Anthropic's Claude, a move that could extend the use of frontier AI across the country's financial ecosystem, Anthropic India Managing Director Irina Ghose has said.

Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai during a fireside chat titled "AI Native Markets: Driving the Next Era of Financial Advantage", Ghose said the initiative could give businesses and developers a common platform on which to build and deploy AI-led solutions more widely.

She described the effort as a way of solving for larger ecosystems by making capabilities centrally available, so that connectors built on top of them become far more pervasive.

Scale and diversity as the core challenge

Ghose said India's AI opportunity is tied to its ability to address problems at population scale, given the size and variety of its user base and its multilingual requirements. The country's complexity, she said, lies in the diversity of the population it serves, its scale, and the languages that must be solved for.

Making advanced AI available in sectors such as banking, agriculture, education and healthcare could address challenges that go beyond individual enterprises and carry AI applications to the last mile, she added. In each of these areas, she said, the real difference emerges when population-scale problems are tackled by reaching the last mile.

Data residency and governance

As enterprise adoption grows, Ghose flagged the importance of AI infrastructure and data processing capacity being located within India. She said the availability of Anthropic's Claude models through Amazon Bedrock in the country would address requirements around data residency, security and governance.

Data privacy and the need for data to reside within national boundaries have long been demands of the industry, she said, adding that the company wants to ensure privacy for data residing in the country while serving institutions and people.

A shift in how firms adopt AI

For businesses, the development points to a broader shift in India's AI ecosystem, with large financial institutions, fintechs and infrastructure platforms increasingly seeking to embed frontier AI into their operations rather than confining adoption to standalone or point solutions.

Ghose also said the biggest business value of artificial intelligence lies not merely in improving efficiency or cutting costs, but in helping companies solve complex problems that were previously difficult to address.