Agents at Work: Infosys and Anthropic Bet Big on AI for Regulated Industries

Graphic showing Infosys and Anthropic logos connected to an AI brain for regulated industries. — Infosys and Anthropic partner to deliver secure, scalable AI solutions for highly regulated enterprise sectors.

The strategic collaboration combines Infosys Topaz with Anthropic's Claude models to build agentic AI systems capable of handling complex, compliance-sensitive workflows — starting with a dedicated Center of Excellence in telecommunications.

In a move that signals a new phase in enterprise AI adoption, Infosys and Anthropic announced on February 16, 2026, a sweeping strategic collaboration to design and deploy advanced AI agents across some of the world's most complex and regulated industries. Unveiled at India's AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, the partnership brings together Infosys's deep domain expertise and global delivery scale with Anthropic's frontier Claude AI models — including Claude Code and the Claude Agent SDK.

The collaboration begins in telecommunications, where a dedicated Anthropic Center of Excellence will be established to build and deploy industry-specific AI agents. From there, it will expand into financial services, manufacturing, engineering, and software development.

Bridging the Gap Between Demo and Deployment

One of the clearest articulations of the partnership's purpose came from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who acknowledged a challenge well known to enterprises: AI that performs brilliantly in controlled demonstrations often struggles in the messy, compliance-heavy reality of regulated industries. The gap, he noted, can only be closed with genuine domain expertise — something Infosys has built over decades across telecommunications, financial services, and manufacturing.

Infosys CEO Salil Parekh framed the collaboration as a strategic leap, describing AI not merely as a tool for efficiency but as a force redefining how entire industries operate and innovate. The partnership, he said, reflects a shared commitment to delivering transformational value rather than incremental gains.

Agentic AI: Beyond the Chatbot

A defining feature of the collaboration is its focus on agentic AI — systems designed not merely to answer questions but to autonomously execute multi-step tasks across extended workflows. Using the Claude Agent SDK, Infosys and Anthropic will help enterprises deploy AI agents capable of working persistently through long, intricate processes: processing insurance claims, generating and testing code, managing compliance reviews, and more — without requiring constant human intervention at every step.

This represents a qualitative shift from first-generation enterprise AI deployments, which largely automated single, isolated tasks. Agentic systems can coordinate across systems of record, adapt to intermediate outputs, and complete end-to-end business processes — the kind of capability that regulated industries have long demanded but struggled to realize safely.

Telecommunications: The Launchpad

The collaboration kicks off in telecommunications — one of the most operationally complex and heavily regulated sectors in the world. Carriers managing sprawling legacy infrastructure, strict regulatory obligations, and increasingly demanding customers are natural candidates for agentic AI.

Through the dedicated Anthropic Center of Excellence, AI agents will target three core areas: modernizing network operations, streamlining customer lifecycle management, and improving end-to-end service delivery. Crucially, the integration of Infosys Topaz with Claude is also designed to ease the migration of legacy systems — a perennial pain point for telecoms that have long deferred costly overhauls of aging infrastructure.

Financial Services, Manufacturing, and Beyond

As the collaboration expands, financial services will see AI agents applied to risk detection and assessment, compliance reporting automation, and hyper-personalized customer interactions — for instance, tailoring financial advice to individual clients based on their full account histories and prevailing market conditions.

In manufacturing and engineering, Claude will be deployed to accelerate product design and simulation, compressing R&D timelines and enabling engineers to run more design iterations before committing to production. For software development teams more broadly, Claude Code will be used to write, test, and debug code — helping developers move faster from design to production. And across enterprise operations, Claude Cowork will automate routine knowledge work: document summarization, status reporting, and review cycles.

A High-Stakes Bet on AI-Native Services

The announcement arrives at a particularly charged moment for India's IT services sector. Earlier in February 2026, shares of major Indian IT firms fell sharply after Anthropic launched enterprise AI tools capable of automating tasks historically performed by large professional workforces. The Infosys-Anthropic deal was interpreted by markets as a response — shares of Infosys rose nearly 5% the day the partnership was announced.

For Infosys, the logic is clear: rather than defend against AI disruption, embed it into the core of the services model. AI-related services already contributed approximately 5.5% of the company's total revenue in the December 2025 quarter. The Anthropic partnership is designed to accelerate that trajectory, turning Claude's capabilities into the backbone of a new generation of managed AI services.

The deal also coincides with Anthropic opening its first India office in Bengaluru, as the company seeks to deepen its footprint in what has become its second-largest market globally — accounting for roughly 6% of Claude usage worldwide, with much of that activity concentrated in software development.

Governance and Transparency at the Core

Both companies have stressed that governance and transparency are not afterthoughts in this collaboration but foundational requirements. Regulated industries such as banking and telecommunications operate under strict oversight regimes — any AI system deployed in these environments must be explainable, auditable, and compliant with regional and sector-specific regulations.

Claude's availability across all three major hyperscale cloud platforms — Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Azure — gives enterprises flexibility in where and how they deploy these agents, while also supporting data residency and compliance requirements across jurisdictions.

What Comes Next

Neither Infosys nor Anthropic disclosed the financial terms of the deal or a precise timeline for when Claude-powered AI agents will reach clients. What is clear is that the telecommunications Center of Excellence is the immediate priority, with subsequent industry verticals to follow as the collaboration matures.

The partnership joins a growing list of strategic alliances between major IT services firms and frontier AI labs — HCLTech and OpenAI announced a comparable deal in 2025. The race to embed AI deeply into enterprise workflows is intensifying, and the Infosys-Anthropic collaboration is one of the most ambitious bets yet on what enterprise-grade agentic AI can accomplish in highly regulated environments.

For telecommunications carriers, financial institutions, and manufacturers navigating aging systems and mounting compliance burdens, the promise of AI that can handle complex, multi-step processes autonomously — with the governance guarantees regulated industries require — represents a significant opportunity. Whether the collaboration delivers on that promise will depend on how quickly domain-specific agents can move from development to production deployment at scale.

Infosys (NSE/BSE/NYSE: INFY) is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. Anthropic is an AI safety and research company. The collaboration was announced February 16, 2026, at India's AI Impact Summit, New Delhi.

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Agents at Work: Infosys and Anthropic Bet Big on AI for Regulated Industries