Anthropic has hired three cofounders and a number of senior employees from London-based AI startup HumanLoop.
Founded in 2020 as a UCL (University College London) spinout, HumanLoop previously won the backing of leading VC firms such as Y Combinator, Index Ventures and Albion with its enterprise AI platform, which enabled customers to evaluate and integrate large language models (LLMs) at scale.
On Wednesday, Anthropic confirmed it had hired HumanLoop’s three active cofounders — CEO Raza Habib, CTO Peter Hayes and CPO Jordan Burgess — as well as most of HumanLoop’s team of a dozen or so engineers and researchers.
According to an email seen by Sifted, HumanLoop notified customers in July that it would soon be shutting down its platform, describing the move as a “very difficult decision” which had been taken because the company had entered “a process to be acquired”.
While Anthropic has hired around 10 or so HumanLoop employees, Sifted can confirm the US tech giant behind AI chatbot Claude has not acquired the company or its intellectual property.
“We’re thrilled to welcome the Humanloop founders and team members to Anthropic,” the company’s API product lead Brad Abrams tells Sifted. “Their proven experience in AI tooling and evaluation will be invaluable as we continue to advance our work in AI safety and building useful AI systems.”
With competition for AI talent heating up, US tech giants are increasingly looking to Europe for technical expertise, either buying companies purely to onboard their employees (“acqui-hires”) or sidestepping the acquisition process and hiring entire teams en masse (“reverse acqui-hires”).
In March, Microsoft poached the cofounders of British video-generation platform Haiper; in May, Salesforce acquired London-based AI startup Convergence for an undisclosed sum; and just weeks ago, NiCE paid almost $1bn for Germany’s Cognigy.
“From our earliest days, we’ve been focused on creating tools that help developers build AI applications safely and effectively,” says Habib. “Anthropic’s commitment to AI safety research and responsible AI development perfectly aligns with our vision.”
Sifted recently reported that Anthropic was offering salaries of up to £340k for AI engineers in London, as it ramps up a European hiring spree.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/anthropic-acquisition-ai-humanloop/
