Anthropic is launching a major European hiring push as an AI talent crunch hits the region, with startups increasingly competing with homegrown competitors and big tech rivals for a limited pool of expert workers.
The US GenAI leader, which built the chatbot Claude, announced on Tuesday it was creating more than 100 new engineering, research, sales and business operations roles across Europe. The jobs would primarily be based in its London and Dublin offices, with some to be based in its Zurich-based research hub, which it opened last year.
The move comes as Big Tech and startup rivals intensify fighting for top AI workers amid a scramble for talent in the sector, with many forced to ramp up creative recruiting tactics as they sweat over a shortage.
"We've long planned to deepen our investment [in Europe],” said Daniela Amodei, president and cofounder of Anthropic, in a statement. “Since launching Claude in Europe last year, we've seen rapid organic growth amongst businesses and consumers alike, confirming the region’s strategic importance to Anthropic's future.”
Anthropic announced it had hired former Stripe exec Guillaume Princen as head of Europe, the Middle East and Africa to lead the AI company's expansion.
Fight for talent
A global flurry of investor cash has been funnelled into businesses developing AI tech in recent times, strengthening the war chests of the biggest and seeing a number of smaller startups entering the market.
AI companies raised $110bn globally in 2024, according to Dealroom — a record figure and around a third more than the previous two years.
The flow of capital is showing no signs of slowing, and there are more roles being created at tech companies in Europe than there are people to fill them with competition is getting fiercer, startups told Sifted in March.
European startups are also contending with the allure of job opportunities at deep-pocketed US Big Tech companies that’ve set up shop in the region in recent times.
OpenAI’s plans for a new office in Munich, which it announced in February — its fifth in Europe after London, Dublin in 2023 and Paris and Brussels in late 2024 — caused anxiety among startups in Germany, who feared it would deepen the talent shortage.
Microsoft also said it would be opening a new London office last year and Anthropic opened an office in Zurich, Switzerland in December. In February one of the former cofounders of buzzy French agentic AI startup H Company announced he’d joined Meta.
Execs at Europe’s homegrown AI darlings, including ElevenLabs, Synthesia and Nscale, say they’re stepping up efforts to get closer to star researchers from the continent’s top institutions, as a result.
Those measures include upskilling engineers internally, deepening ties with European research institutions and even looking to lean on AI agents to pick up some of the slack as the nascent tech develops.
“AI talent has never been in higher demand, and US Big Tech expanding into Europe has only intensified competition,” Dan Bathurst, chief product officer at AI data centre startup Nscale, told Sifted in March.
