US giant Anthropic poaches British AI firm founders in OpenAI rivalry

Wednesday 13 August 2025 3:13 pm

Anthropic has employed the three cofounders of London-based AI startup HumanLoop, together with most of its engineering and analysis employees, in its newest transfer to bolster AI expertise in Europe.

As Sifted reported on Tuesday, the hires embody chief government Raza Habib, chief tech officer Peter Hayes and chief product officer Jordan Burgess, all of whom established HumanLoop in 2020 as a College School London spinout.

HumanLoop constructed a platform for enterprises to check, examine and combine giant language fashions (LLMs) into their operations, with an emphasis on serving to builders deploy AI instruments safely and effectively.

It secured backing from Y Combinator, Index Ventures and AlbionVC, and counted monetary providers companies, healthcare suppliers and know-how corporations amongst its clients.

In July, HumanLoop advised purchasers it might shut down its platform after coming into “a course of to be acquired”.

Anthropic confirmed it had not purchased the corporate or its mental property, however mentioned the group’s experience can be “invaluable” for advancing AI security and tooling.

Federal push to outflank OpenAI

The hiring spree comes only a week after OpenAI provided its ChatGPT Enterprise product to US federal government department businesses for $1 per 12 months.

Anthropic responded with a broader provide – the identical worth for all three branches of the US authorities, for one 12 months – because it seeks to safe a bigger foothold within the public sector.

Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, says its “Claude for Authorities” product meets strict safety requirements and may run throughout AWS, Google Cloud and Palantir, giving businesses extra flexibility over knowledge storage than OpenAI’s Microsoft Azure–tied setup.

The corporate already works with the US Division of Defence and different businesses, and has been aggressively recruiting in London, with AI engineer salaries reportedly reaching £340,000.

Competitors is rising following OpenAI’s announcement of its new instruments in March, aimed toward simplifying the method of constructing brokers that may autonomously full duties on behalf of customers to rival Anthropic’s launch of its new AI agent within the month prior.

To streamline this course of, the ChatGPT proprietor launched 5 new instruments to assist companies and clients construct and scale agentic AI.