US giant Anthropic poaches British AI firm founders in OpenAI rivalry
Anthropic has hired the three cofounders of London-based AI startup HumanLoop, along with most of its engineering and research staff, in its latest move to bolster AI talent in Europe.
As Sifted reported on Tuesday, the hires include 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.
In July, HumanLoop told clients it would shut down its platform after entering “a process to be acquired”.
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.
Federal push to outflank OpenAI
The hiring spree comes just a week after OpenAI offered its ChatGPT Enterprise product to US federal executive branch agencies for $1 per year.
Anthropic responded with a broader offer – the same price for all three branches of the US government, for one year – as it seeks to secure a larger foothold in the public sector.
Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, says its “Claude for Government” product meets strict security standards and can run across AWS, Google Cloud and Palantir, giving agencies more flexibility over data storage than OpenAI’s Microsoft Azure–tied setup.
The company already works with the US Department of Defence and other agencies, and has been aggressively recruiting in London, with AI engineer salaries reportedly reaching £340,000.
Competition is rising following OpenAI’s announcement of its new tools in March, aimed at simplifying the process of building agents that can autonomously complete tasks on behalf of users to rival Anthropic’s launch of its new AI agent in the month prior.
To streamline this process, the ChatGPT owner released five new tools to help businesses and customers build and scale agentic AI.