Overview
On February 17, 2026, Anthropic and Infosys announced a major strategic collaboration. The goal: bring enterprise-grade AI agents powered by Claude into some of the world's most complex and heavily regulated industries — telecom, financial services, manufacturing, and software development.
At the heart of the deal is a simple but important idea. There is a big gap between an AI model that works in a demo and one that works in a regulated industry. Closing that gap requires two things: a powerful AI model and deep industry expertise. This partnership combines both.
The collaboration integrates Anthropic's Claude models, including Claude Code, with Infosys Topaz AI offerings to help enterprises automate complex workflows, accelerate software delivery, and build agentic AI solutions.
For businesses navigating strict compliance rules, legacy systems, and operational complexity, this partnership could represent a turning point in practical AI adoption.
What Is Infosys Topaz?
Infosys Topaz is not a single product. It is an AI-first set of services, solutions, and platforms that Infosys offers to enterprise clients. Think of it as the delivery vehicle — the framework that large organizations use to plan, build, and run AI-powered systems.
Topaz already serves Fortune 500 clients across industries. It handles the messy realities of corporate IT: legacy systems, compliance requirements, global operations, and multi-year transformation programs. By plugging Claude directly into Topaz, Infosys can now offer AI agents that are not just smart but also deployable in real enterprise environments.
What Is Agentic AI — and Why Does It Matter?
Most enterprise AI tools today are still reactive. You ask a question, the AI answers. That is useful, but limited.
Agentic AI works differently. These are systems that go beyond answering questions to independently handling multi-step tasks like processing claims, generating and testing code, or managing compliance reviews.
An AI agent does not wait to be asked. It takes action. It works through a sequence of steps on its own. It handles a task from start to finish without a human doing each step manually.
This matters enormously in regulated industries where routine, rule-based processes take up enormous amounts of human time — and where errors carry real legal and financial consequences.
What Industries Does This Cover?
The collaboration targets four specific sectors. Here is a breakdown of what Claude-powered AI agents will do in each:
| Industry | Key AI Agent Use Cases |
|---|---|
| Telecommunications | Modernize network operations, streamline customer lifecycle management, improve service delivery |
| Financial Services | Risk detection and assessment, automate compliance reporting, personalized customer interactions |
| Manufacturing & Engineering | Accelerate product design and simulation, reduce R&D timelines |
| Software Development | Write, test, and debug code using Claude Code; move faster from design to production |
The financial services agents will help companies detect and assess risk, automate compliance reporting, and personalize customer interactions. In manufacturing, Claude-powered capabilities will be used to accelerate product design and simulation, helping reduce research and development timelines.
Where Does the Partnership Start?
The collaboration will begin in telecommunications with a dedicated Anthropic Center of Excellence to build and deploy AI agents tailored to industry-specific operations.
This Center of Excellence (CoE) will not just build agents. It will develop AI accelerators, industry templates, and governance frameworks designed specifically for regulated sectors. These frameworks matter because regulated industries cannot simply plug in a generic AI tool. They need documented controls, audit trails, and compliance mechanisms built in from the start.
After telecom, the partnership will expand into financial services, manufacturing, and software development.
The Tools Behind the Collaboration
| Tool | Role in the Partnership |
|---|---|
| Claude models | Core language and reasoning capabilities powering all AI agents |
| Claude Code | Helps developers write, test, and debug code faster |
| Claude Agent SDK | Enables agents to work persistently across long, complex multi-step processes |
| Claude Cowork | Automates routine enterprise tasks like document summarization, status reporting, and review cycles |
| Infosys Topaz | The delivery platform that integrates everything into existing enterprise systems |
Claude is the only frontier model available on all three of the world's most prominent cloud services: Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Azure. That availability matters for enterprise clients who are already committed to one of these cloud providers.
Why Regulated Industries Are Hard for AI
Standard AI deployments fail in regulated industries for predictable reasons:
- Compliance complexity. Industries like banking and telecom operate under strict rules. An AI system that makes a wrong decision can trigger regulatory penalties.
- Legacy systems. Most large enterprises run decades-old infrastructure. AI tools must integrate with these systems, not replace them overnight.
- Audit requirements. Regulated businesses must document why decisions were made. AI systems need transparency and explainability built in.
- Scale and persistence. Enterprise workflows are not one-off tasks. They run continuously, involve many systems, and require agents that work reliably over long time periods.
The collaboration will also help organizations modernize legacy systems, combining Infosys Topaz and Claude to make migration faster and easier and reduce the cost of updating aging infrastructure.
What This Means for Infosys
Infosys is the second-largest IT services company in India and a global player with clients across every major industry. The company has been under pressure as investors worry that AI will reduce demand for traditional IT outsourcing work.
This partnership is a direct response to that pressure. Rather than compete against AI, Infosys is positioning itself as the expert that enterprises need to deploy AI safely and at scale.
AI-related services generated revenue of ₹25 billion (around $275 million), or 5.5% of the company's total revenue in the December quarter. The collaboration with Anthropic is designed to grow that share significantly.
Infosys shares gained 4.8% on Tuesday, the most in two weeks, when the partnership was announced — a signal that markets see real value in the deal.
What This Means for Anthropic
For Anthropic, the partnership solves a distribution problem. Building a powerful AI model is one challenge. Getting it deployed inside the complex IT environments of major banks, telecom carriers, and manufacturers is a completely different challenge.
For Anthropic, the partnership offers a route into heavily regulated enterprise sectors where deploying AI systems at scale requires industry expertise and governance capabilities.
Infosys brings that expertise. It has relationships with enterprise clients built over decades. It understands their systems, their compliance requirements, and their risk tolerance. That is exactly what Anthropic needs to move beyond developer usage and into large-scale enterprise contracts.
Anthropic this week also opened its first India office in Bengaluru, as it seeks to expand further into the country, which has grown into the company's second-largest market. India now accounts for about 6% of global Claude usage, second only to the U.S.
The Infosys–Anthropic Partnership at a Glance
| Factor | Detail |
|---|---|
| Announced | February 17, 2026 |
| Announced at | India AI Impact Summit, New Delhi |
| Starting industry | Telecommunications |
| Other target industries | Financial services, manufacturing, software development |
| Core AI technology | Claude models, Claude Code, Claude Agent SDK, Claude Cowork |
| Delivery platform | Infosys Topaz |
| First structural step | Dedicated Anthropic Center of Excellence at Infosys |
| Infosys AI revenue (Dec quarter) | ~$275 million (5.5% of total revenue) |
| India's share of Claude usage | ~6% globally, second only to the U.S. |
How Claude Code Fits In
In software development, teams will use Claude Code to write, test, and debug code — helping developers move faster from design through production. Infosys is already deploying Claude Code within its own Exponential Engineering organization, building internal expertise and best practices that will directly inform client engagements.
This is significant. Infosys is not just reselling Claude. It is using Claude Code internally first, building real expertise, and then applying that expertise to client work. That approach typically produces better outcomes than partnerships where tools are passed along without genuine internal adoption.
Broader Industry Context
Infosys is not alone in this strategy. HCLTech and OpenAI last year partnered up to help enterprises deploy AI tools at scale. The major Indian IT services firms — Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCLTech — are all racing to become the preferred AI implementation partner for global enterprises.
AI adoption is anticipated to reduce net costs for banks by up to 20%, but cost reductions depend heavily on the industry's ability to adopt agentic AI, according to McKinsey & Company's Global Banking Annual Review 2025.
That figure explains why financial services is a priority target. The potential savings are enormous. But realizing them requires exactly the kind of infrastructure, governance, and expertise that a partnership like this one is designed to provide.
What to Watch Next
The partnership is early stage. Infosys did not disclose deployment timelines or financial terms. But several indicators will signal how well it is progressing:
| Signal | What It Would Mean |
|---|---|
| Telecom client announcements | The CoE is delivering production-ready agents |
| Expansion beyond telecom | The model is working and scaling to other industries |
| Growth in Infosys AI revenue share | Claude-powered services are gaining commercial traction |
| Claude Code adoption metrics | Internal expertise is translating into client value |
Conclusion
The Claude and Infosys Topaz partnership is one of the most concrete examples yet of how enterprise AI adoption actually happens. It is not about a single powerful model. It is about combining AI capability with industry expertise, governance frameworks, and the ability to work inside complex legacy systems.
The collaboration integrates Anthropic's Claude models with Infosys Topaz to help enterprises automate complex workflows and adopt AI with the governance and transparency that regulated industries require.
For enterprises in telecom, financial services, and manufacturing, this partnership signals that production-grade AI agents are no longer a future possibility — they are arriving now. The question is not whether to adopt agentic AI, but which partner has the expertise to deploy it safely and at scale.