Anthropic: UK staff get eye-watering sums at AI giant
US AI giant Anthropic is paying its UK staff eye-watering financial packages as it attempts to build a foothold in this country.
The business, which only launched in the UK at the start of 2023, increased its headcount from six to 43 in 2024 while its staff costs rocketed from £3.6m to £24m.
Its wage bill went from £1.6m to £12.3m in the year while its share-base payments jumped from £1.7m to £9.6m.
Social security costs grew from £216,731 to £1.6m while other pension costs also went from £36,313 to £380,976.
The increases mean that, if divided equally, Anthropic’s total staff costs is enough for each UK employee’s financial package to total almost £560,000 a year.
The new accounts filed with Companies House also show the UK arm’s turnover jumped from £5m to £29.5m and its pre-tax profit surged from £500,919 to £2.6m.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by CEO Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Jared Kaplan, Jack Clark and Ben Mann in San Francisco.
The business has developed a group of large language models named Claude and was valued at over $183bn last month.
Anthropic received $4bn from Amazon in September 2023 and £2bn from Google the following month.
Anthropic poaches British AI firm’s leadership
In August, Morning Wire reported that Anthropic had hired the three co-founders of London-based AI startup HumanLoop, along with most of its engineering and research staff.
The hires included chief executive Raza Habib, chief tech officer Peter Hayes and chief product officer Jordan Burgess, all of whom established HumanLoop in 2020 as a University College London spinout.
HumanLoop built a platform for enterprises to test, compare and integrate large language models (LLMs) into their operations, with an emphasis on helping developers deploy AI tools safely and efficiently.
It secured backing from Y Combinator, Index Ventures and AlbionVC, and counted financial services firms, healthcare providers and technology companies among its customers.
At the time, Anthropic confirmed it had not bought the company or its intellectual property, but said the team’s expertise would be “invaluable” for advancing AI safety and tooling.
Earlier this year, Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei warned that AI could eliminate up to 50 per cent of all entry level white collar jobs within the next five years – with the UK market particularly vulnerable to disruption.
Speaking at his company’s inaugural developer conference, Amodei said the widespread adoption of AI, especially advanced language models like Claude-Anthropic’s flagship product, is progressing quicker than most people realise.
OpenAI UK rakes in millions
In July, Morning Wire reported that OpenAI had raked in millions of pounds since the launch of artificial intelligence (AI) service ChatGPT in the UK.
The UK division of the US tech giant ended last year with current assets of £56.2m which included £42.4m in the bank and a further £13.7m owed by debtors, according to accounts filed with Companies House.
Those totals compare to the current assets of £1.1m the business had at the end of the 15 months to 31 December, 2023, which was made up of £198,915 in the bank and £973,990 owed by debtors.
OpenAI’s non-current assets also rose from £178,823 to £964,495 but its current liabilities also surged from £476,555 to £42.2m.
Of the £42.2m it owes, £39.8m is inter-company debt which is not expected to be paid back to its US parent.
At the end of 2024, the company’s shareholders’ funds had increased from £875,173 to £6.2m while it made a profit of £4.1m in the year, up from a loss of £1.2m.
According to the results, the number of people employed by OpenAI increased from 19 to 55. It’s understood that the business now employs around 100 people in the UK.
OpenAI UK Limited was set up in September 2022 when ChatGPT was launched.