India's Infosys ties up with Anthropic, days after IT selloff

By Sai Ishwarbharath B and Haripriya Suresh

BENGALURU, Feb 17 (Reuters) - Infosys INFY.NS unveiled a partnership with Anthropic on Tuesday, days after investor concerns that AI tools would disrupt the traditional business models of Indian IT services firms shaved billions off their market value.

The selloff was triggered, in part, by the launch of a tool by Amazon AMZN.O and Alphabet GOOGL.O-backed Anthropic, which has seen its revenue run-rate in India doubling in four months.

Anthropic has leaned heavily into the enterprise AI market and last month launched Claude Cowork, an AI agent that helps execute computer tasks for white-collar workers. The startup has existing partnerships with Indian companies such as Air India.

Under the tie-up, Infosys and Anthropic will develop and deploy AI agents, initially focusing on telecom, and then expanding into financial services, manufacturing, and software development, the firms said in a statement.

"There's a big gap between an AI model that works in a demo and one that works in a regulated industry, and if you want to close that gap, you need domain expertise," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on the Infosys tie-up.

Infosys shares rose as much as 4.8%, snapping a four‑session losing streak, and closed 1.9% higher, making it among the top gainers on the blue‑chip Nifty 50 .NSEI, which ended 0.17% higher.

The Indian firm said on Tuesday that AI services accounted for 5.5% of its total revenue in the December quarter. Larger rival Tata Consultancy Services TCS.NS has said AI services generate roughly 5.8% of its annual revenue.

The contribution from AI services "is growing at a robust pace," Infosys CEO Salil Parekh said. The CEO had earlier said that Infosys was working on 4,600 AI projects and had developed more than 500 agents.

Last week, Indian IT stocks had their worst showing in more than 10 months. In all, IT firms have lost $44.46 billion in market capitalization so far in February.

"Infosys has better exposure to discretionary spends and TCS has a lot more legacy clients and systems, and works with a larger number of public sector clients who may take time to decide and allocate funds for AI services," Centrum Broking analyst Piyush Pandey said, signalling that Infosys is better placed than TCS to leverage the technology.

($1 = 90.7510 Indian rupees)