FILE PHOTO: Anthropic logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024.
| Photo Credit:
Dado Ruvic
India’s major IT services firms face a near-term threat following Anthropic’s move to enter the Software-as-a-Service sector.
On Monday, Anthropic, along with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs announced a new AI services venture to bring Claude into the most important operations of mid-sized companies across sectors. This puts the company in direct competition with India’s major IT services firms like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), HCL Technologies, Infosys and Wipro. Domain experts said that while companies will not lose the bulk of their clients, management will be hard-pressed with fresh negotiations in terms of AI usage.
Speaking about a company like TCS, which carries the full weight of the traditional services model, Sanchit Vir Gogia, Chief Analyst and Founder of Greyhound Research, said, “Large clients will not walk away casually from deeply embedded relationships. They will, however, use AI as a renegotiation instrument. They will ask TCS to automate more, staff less, price differently and move faster. TCS can defend itself by turning its scale into governed AI operating capacity, but it has to move the conversation from headcount to outcomes with real commercial courage.”
In the case of Infosys, Gogia said the risk is channel conflict where Infosys risks being pulled into downstream integration rather than front-end conversations with clients, putting the company in a weaker position. Further, while HCLTech can defend its ground in terms of workflow integration, operation and security, Wipro faces the sharpest narrative test among the big four, said Gogia.
“For Wipro, the Anthropic announcement is both warning and opportunity. The market will punish firms that cannot convert AI intent into new revenue architecture. Wipro can use the moment to accelerate its own move towards services-as-software, industry-specific AI platforms, Capco-led financial services depth and forward-deployed engineering models. This requires discipline,” he said.
Regardless of how each company approaches the development, the announcement will pose a threat to the large-cap companies at least in the short term, as per Rajesh Palviya, Senior Vice President – Head Research, Axis Securities.
From a long-term perspective, it will be important to understand how they secure orders from end-users. Most of India’s IT companies planned to cater to companies by doing tie-ups with AI companies. This will now be challenging when Anthropic has started their own venture,” said Palviya.
The analyst also warned of major pressure for entry-level jobs as specialised talent will be given priority as manpower decreases. Building on this notion, Gogia said wage hikes will become more selective, promotion cycles less automatic.
“Reskilling budgets will grow, but they will be aimed at roles the firm wants to preserve or reposition, not at the entire workforce equally. Lateral hiring will favour AI architecture, cyber, data, cloud, domain, governance and product engineering,” he said.
Campus hiring will narrow around AI fluency, with billing rates coming under pressure in commodity work and remaining firm in scarce, regulated or high-complexity work.
“This will create friction inside Indian IT organisations. Employees are being asked to become more productive with AI, but the economic gains from that productivity will not automatically flow back to them. Some employees will rightly ask why they should help automate their own billability. Firms must handle this carefully,” said Gogia.
Published on May 5, 2026
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