HCLTech taps Anthropic to boost AI enterprise play

Indian IT firm HCLTech struck an agreement with Anthropic to establish a separate business unit designed to accelerate enterprise adoption of agentic AI, with a focus on safety, cybersecurity and governance.

HCLTech stated its services team will build industry solutions and offerings powered by Anthropic’s Claude, Cowork and Claude Code, while its HCLSoftware business unit will embed these capabilities into select enterprise products.

The company will further establish a dedicated “Anthropic Business Unit and Centre of Excellence” to accelerate use of Claude in enterprise environments, providing secure sandbox environments to enable development.

Clients will also be aided by the partnership with the adoption of AI-native engineering practices, training workforces and building organisational capabilities to operate agentic AI safety at scale.

As what is known as an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partner, HCLSoftware will be given access to advanced models. It cited select products across cybersecurity, automation, business process application and application development as services that will benefit from advanced Claude capabilities.

Claude will also be used across IT support and for digital employee services, workflows supported by policy guardrails, exception handling and human oversight for high-impact changes.

CEO and managing director at HCLTech, C Vijayakumar, said few technology companies can combine the scale of a global systems integrator with the product depth of an ISV.

“That gives us a rare advantage to securely engineer and deploy Agentic AI at scale and deliver the business outcomes that matter most to our clients.”

HCLTech’s deal with Anthropic follows an agreement worth $1.1 billion in July with a major unnamed European company to deploy AI services and boost enterprise services for the business.