Cognizant, a technology service provider in the U.S., is partnering with Anthropic, an AI company, to implement Claude's large language models model and agentic capabilities across operations and client engagements. They are combining Anthropic's Claude family of models and agency tools with Cognizant's engineering platforms and industry frameworks to help their enterprise customers move from AI trials to scaled business applications. Cognizant plans to align its software engineering and platforms with Anthropic capabilities, including Claude for Enterprise, Claude Code, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and Agent SDK, for clients to use AI enhanced observations with existing applications and data, or orchestrate multi-step tasks with human oversight, and manage performance, risk, and costs accordingly.

The New Jersey-based IT services company will also provide Claude internally to associates across corporate functions, engineering and delivery teams to enhance productivity and advance AI maturity. The rollout could reach up to 350,000 Cognizant employees.
"Enterprises are moving beyond simple productivity gains toward a more connected, agentic future," said Ravi Kumar S, Cognizant chief executive. "By pairing Anthropic's Claude models and agentic tooling with Cognizant's suite of platforms and industry expertise, we will help clients build the foundations of an agentified enterprise where intelligent systems collaborate with people to accelerate modernisation, engineering and industry transformation."

Paul Smith, Anthropic's chief commercial officer, stated: "The combination of frontier AI with deep domain expertise and implementation capabilities is what makes this partnership so exciting and will absolutely accelerate AI in the enterprise. Companies require trusted AI that combines cutting-edge performance with safety and reliability, which is why hundreds of thousands of businesses trust Claude."

Initial partnership focus areas include:

Software engineering productivity: Deploying Claude and Claude Code with Cognizant's Flowsource platform to accelerate coding tasks, testing, documentation and DevOps workflows with MCP-based access to developer tools.

Legacy modernisation: Combining Cognizant's modernisation frameworks with Anthropic's code understanding and transformation capabilities to speed analysis and refactoring across large codebases.

Agentification: Using Cognizant's Neuro AI Multi-Agent Orchestration and Anthropic's Agent SDK to design reusable, domain-specific agents and multi-agent systems operating with explicit policies, approvals and human-in-the-loop controls.
Industry solutions: Developing vertical solutions beginning with financial services, leveraging Cognizant Agent Foundry with Claude to embed agentic workflows into regulated enterprise environments.

Responsible AI: Advancing practices for safe deployment, monitoring and operations at scale, aligned to enterprise governance requirements and open standards including MCP.
Cognizant plans engaging clients through workshops, reference patterns and platform integrations using Claude to help teams identify high-value use cases and move them into production enabling measurable outcomes.

The partnership reflects intensifying competition amongst IT services companies to secure relationships with leading AI providers as enterprise clients increasingly demand AI capabilities integrated throughout technology services rather than as standalone offerings.
Cognizant competes with Indian firms including Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro, alongside American rival Accenture, all of which have announced partnerships with various AI companies including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and others.

For Anthropic, the Cognizant arrangement provides substantial distribution reaching enterprise clients whilst demonstrating Claude's capabilities at scale through the 350,000-employee internal deployment. The San Francisco-based AI company competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and other large language models for enterprise adoption.
The emphasis on "agentic" AI—systems capable of taking autonomous actions within defined parameters—represents current industry focus on moving beyond simple question-answering toward AI that can complete multi-step tasks with limited human intervention.

Whether such partnerships genuinely transform enterprise operations or primarily rebrand existing services with AI terminology remains debated. Early adopters report varied results, with some achieving significant efficiency gains whilst others struggle with integration complexity, accuracy concerns and unclear return on investment.

Cognizant's focus on human oversight and governance frameworks addresses growing recognition that fully autonomous AI systems introduce risks around accuracy, security and compliance that many enterprises find unacceptable for critical operations.
Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed, though such arrangements typically involve revenue sharing on client deployments alongside commitments for internal usage volumes.