AI lab Anthropic launches Sydney office
Make us a preferred source
Make us a preferred source on Google
The news: AI lab Anthropic has launched its Sydney office ahead of plans for its executive team to visit Australia at the end of March to formalise partnerships as well as to meet customers and policymakers.
The context: An Anthropic spokesperson told Capital Brief that the company hopes “to be able to announce some positions soon” as it moves to recruit a Sydney team.
The team is expected to have “deep local market insight” and will include “sales, finance, recruiting and partnerships, applied AI, sales engineering, marketing and policy roles”. In the long term Anthropic hopes to add research and technical engineering roles.
According to an announcement blogpost on Wednesday, the Sydney team will deepen Anthropic’s “engagement with Australian institutions, as well as collaborate on projects that advance Australia’s national interests and priority sectors”,
Early activities include “exploring adding local capacity through our third-party partners in Australia, using infrastructure already in place”, which will help satisfy data residency requirements for potential government and private sector customers. It is also in “early conversations about longer-term infrastructure in the region”.
Anthropic’s senior leadership was in Australia in February to spruik the company and the company registered a local subsidiary in January.
The official launch of Anthropic’s Australian push follows a public stoush with the US government after the AI lab sought to draw limits on the use of its Claude AI system by the US Department of War. It is also suing the Pentagon for its decision to label the company a supply chain risk, the first time it has applied to an American company.
Rival OpenAI set up shop in Sydney last year and made a slew of partnership announcements in December, coinciding with the federal government’s launch of its National AI Plan.
The two rivals have been collaborating on a set of shared standards for agentic AI, driven by Sydney-based Manik Surtani, who is Block’s head of open source.
Anthropic’s Sydney expansion marks the company’s fourth office in the Asia-Pacific region following Tokyo, Bengaluru and Seoul.
The AI lab said that Australia and New Zealand are the fourth and eighth highest users respectively of Claude as a proportion of the population, with “strong use” for computer and coding tasks on top of educational instruction and research.
The company said it is already working with local companies like Canva, Quantium and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia as well as startups “pioneering new AI applications across diverse fields such as agricultural tech, physical AI, climate tech and more”.
What they said: “We’re excited by the ways organizations in Australia and New Zealand are applying AI to areas of national importance — financial services, agricultural technology, clean energy innovation, healthcare delivery, cutting-edge deep tech and scientific research, along with AI transformation in the enterprise,” said Anthropic managing director of international Chris Ciauri.
“Establishing a local presence will help us to develop strong partnerships in ANZ and ensure Claude is built with respect for the unique goals, opportunities, and challenges of the region.”
The source: Anthropic blogpost
