Anthropic, one of the most valuable privately held AI companies going head-to-head in the generative AI race with OpenAI, is expanding its presence in the Seattle area.
The company currently has more than 20 open positions with Seattle listed as a potential location for new hires. Those listings also include New York City, London, and San Francisco, where the company is based.
There are several Seattle-based employees working for Anthropic, including many who just joined.
- Brian Delahunty, head of engineering. Delahunty started in September and was previously an engineering chief at Nearside and Stripe.
- Andy Stewart, member of technical staff. Stewart, who started at Anthropic last month, co-founded Seattle startup Olis Robotics and was also a manager at Cruise and Amazon.
- Sophia Porter, member of technical staff. Porter joined last month after nearly five years at Blue Origin.
- Tim Sullivan, member of technical staff. Sullivan joined last month and was previously vice president of engineering at Panopto. He also spent more than 12 years at Microsoft.
- Mitchell Wortsman, member of technical staff, joined in January. He earned a Google Ph.D. fellowship in November for his work at the University of Washington’s computer science school.
- David Hershey, member of technical staff. The former product manager at Ford and a seed-stage investor with Unusual Ventures, joined this month.
It’s not clear if Anthropic has a physical office in the Seattle region. We’ve contacted the company for more details.
San Francisco-based Anthropic is among a bevy of other tech companies that have planted a flag in the Seattle area, tapping into the region’s strong base of engineering talent.
Anthropic has a key partnership with Seattle tech giant Amazon, which said in September it would invest up to $4 billion in the company. Amazon’s investment included a commitment by Anthropic to make Amazon Web Services its main cloud provider.
Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, meanwhile, has poured billions into OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Microsoft provides Azure cloud computing resources to OpenAI and makes heavy use of its technologies in its own products.
Anthropic, which is also backed by Google and recently raised more than $7 billion, this week released the latest version of its flagship generative AI product Claude. The company says Claude beats OpenAI’s GPT-4 as measured by performance. The release got a shout-out from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI are at the forefront of a boom in generative AI, which can quickly produce text, images, video, software code, and more from prompts. The companies are getting attention from both investors and regulators scrutinizing their business models. They are also dealing with various legal battles.
Seattle has become a hub for AI technologies, building on the cloud computing prowess of Microsoft and Amazon; their connections to startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic; the Allen Institute for AI; the AI2 Incubator; and the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science.
