Anthropic is the latest AI giant to open an office in Dublin

19 Mar 2024

Image: ©maurice norbert/Stock.adobe.com

The maker of Claude, a ChatGPT rival, said that Dublin will be its main establishment within the EU market.

Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI start-up companies, is set to open its first EU office in Dublin as it looks to expand in Europe.

Backed by industry heavyweights such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce, Anthropic is based in San Francisco. It was founded by siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei, former employees of OpenAI, in 2021 and is today a leading developer of large language models.

While its flagship product, Claude, is not yet available in the EU, Anthropic hopes Ireland will be its main base in the bloc. A spokesperson for the company told multiple outlets that Dublin was chosen as the first EU base because of the strength of its tech ecosystem.

“Its diverse talent base, thriving start-up sector and concentration of major tech firms make it the ideal location from which to grow our European operations,” the spokesperson said. “Over the coming months, we will hire staff across a range of sectors including legal, sales and people operations before expanding our recruiting plans to other areas.”

Anthropic currently has a small office in London, which it opened last May.

Last October, Google agreed to invest $2bn in Anthropic, which included a $500m initial cash infusion and an additional $1.5bn over time. Earlier in the year, Google invested $300m in the company for a 10pc stake. As a result, Anthropic agreed to make Google Cloud its “preferred cloud provider” with the companies “co-develop[ing] AI computing systems”.

Amazon also announced plans to invest up to $4bn in Anthropic and that its cloud business, Amazon Web Services, would be the primary cloud provider for the start-up.

Earlier this month, Anthropic debuted a trio of tools called Claude 3 Opus, Haiku and Sonnet, claiming that the suite sets new industry benchmarks across a wide range of cognitive tasks.

Claude 3 Opus, which the company says is its most intelligent model, reportedly outperformed rival models on basic mathematics tasks and reasoning tasks. Potential uses include task automation, research and development, and strategy forecasting. Anthropic claims it can navigate open-ended prompts with “remarkable fluency” and “human-like understanding”.

Claude 3 Sonnet, meanwhile, is intended for enterprise teams. It can perform functions such as data processing, quality control, forecasting and product recommendations.

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Vish Gain is a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com