June 11 (Reuters) - India's Tata Consultancy Services has partnered with Anthropic to launch an alliance to drive enterprise AI scaling, the country's largest software services exporter said on Thursday.
The partnership comes at a time when investors are concerned that AI tools will disrupt the traditional, labour-intensive business model of India's $315-billion IT sector. In February, Indian IT services firms lost more than $62.8 billion in market capitalization, in part, after Anthropic launched an AI agent tool.
The Tata group company will equip 50,000 associates with Anthropic's Claude and both will jointly take AI solutions to market for highly regulated sectors, it added.
TCS expects IT companies to slow down hiring, as the company moves towards having an equal number of employees and AI agents in its workforce, Chairman N Chandrasekaran said at the company's annual general meeting on Tuesday.
Last July, it cut more than 12,000 jobs, while headcount fell by more than 23,000 on a net basis in the fiscal year ended March 2026.
Rival IT services firm Infosys struck a similar partnership with Anthropic in February.
(Reporting by Urvi Dugar in Bengaluru; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala and Janane Venkatraman)
