Anthropic is emphasising its focus on building “safe” AI models in its pitch to Europe’s top talent, as it looks to outcompete US rivals and homegrown startups for workers amid a major hiring push in the region.
The company, which built the chatbot Claude, announced it was looking to more than double its European headcount of 100 in April. The move comes as competition for top AI talent ramps up across the region, with startups increasingly raising big money rounds and US big tech players opening offices in Europe.
Anthropic — founded by former OpenAI employees with concerns of how the company developed models — is now looking to reinforce its messaging around developing AI responsibility as it expands in Europe, Guillaume Princen, head of EMEA, tells Sifted.
“Anthropic is first and foremost an AI safety company,” he says. “There’s something deeply European about how Anthropic thinks about building AI.”
Europe has adopted a more cautious approach to AI regulation since the ChatGPT-inspired boom in the technology in 2023, though France’s AI summit earlier this year signalled that some leaders in the region were wading back on safety concerns.
Poaching top AI talent in Europe
Since launching in 2021, Anthropic has become one of the global leaders developing large language models (LLMs), alongside the likes of OpenAI, Mistral and Meta, raising $16.3bn from investors including Amazon, Google and Lightspeed.
The company hit a $61.5bn valuation in March this year, when it picked up a $3.5bn Series E.
Anthropic has been quick to generate revenue, with reports that the company had hit $3bn in annualised revenue in May.
While Princen declined to comment on the company’s revenue figures, Anthropic is pushing into Europe “so aggressively” because it’s seeing a big uptick in demand from customers based in the region, Princen says.
The company is working with startups like vibe coding platform Lovable and legaltech RobinAI, alongside a number of enterprise clients, he adds.
There’s also world-leading AI research happening in the region. “It’s no secret that there’s world-class research talent in Europe, and it’s been the case for years, right?” he says, pointing to AI labs in London at DeepMind and Paris at Meta and echoing Nvidia chief Jensen Huang’s comments earlier this week.
Anthropic is also one of many tech companies increasing AI hiring in the region.
OpenAI announced plans for a Munich office earlier this year — its fifth in the region since 2023, Google is opening a new 4k-person office in London later this year and Microsoft is also planning a new AI hub in the UK capital.
In startupland, AI avatar platform Synthesia and AI voice company Elevenlabs both raised $180m earlier this year, and there are reports that Mistral — the only European company developing frontier LLMs — is in talks to raise €1bn.
It’s an increasingly crowded market for AI employers to stand out in, but Anthropic is looking to play up its position as a frontier model developer in the absence of a roster of homegrown competitors in that field.
“The first thing we’re doing [to attract talent] is staying at the frontier,” says Princen. Anthropic just released its fourth generation of Claude models, which it says outperforms OpenAI’s most recent models in a number of metrics.
Another way to attract Europe’s top engineers is to be visible, he adds. Anthropic has hosted several hackathons in the region so far this year, including with Entrepreneur First (EF) in London, General Catalyst in Paris and Lovable and ElevenLabs virtually.
Princen is also doing the rounds at tech events. He was at Dublin Tech Summit in May and is currently at VivaTech in Paris. “I want to make sure that the word is out that we’re hiring,” he says.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/anthropic-european-expansion/
