Anthropic to triple international workforce in global AI push

Anthropic is stepping up its global enterprise ambitions.

The $183 billion artificial intelligence startup has grown its business customer base from under 1,000 to more than 300,000 in just two years, as demand for Claude‘s models accelerates across industries and regions.

On Friday, the company announced it will triple its international workforce and expand its applied AI team fivefold in 2025, as it scales beyond the U.S. and intensifies competition with OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.

That expansion comes as international demand increasingly drives the company’s momentum.

Claude’s global usage has reached an inflection point: nearly 80% of activity now comes from outside the United States. On a per-person basis, adoption in countries like South Korea, Australia and Singapore has already surpassed that of the U.S.

In an exclusive interview, Chief Commercial Officer Paul Smith told CNBC that Anthropic’s international growth is outpacing even their most ambitious forecasts, with major customers coming online well before boots hit the ground. 

“What is amazing is we haven’t, up until recently, had significant human presence in Europe, in Japan, in our international markets, and yet we already have a very, very significant business over there,” said Smith. 

He pointed to rapid adoption in sectors like life sciences and sovereign wealth management.

At Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical giant behind Ozempic, Claude helped compress what’s typically a three-month analysis and reporting phase at the end of a drug development cycle into just a few days.

Smith said Anthropic is now ramping up hiring across its priority global markets.

The company is set to recruit country leads for India, Australia and New Zealand, Korea, and Singapore, with broader expansion underway across the U.K., northern and southern Europe, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

As part of its international push, Anthropic is opening its first Asia office in Tokyo and scaling operations across Europe — including more than 100 new roles in Dublin and London and a research-focused hub in Zurich. Additional locations are expected to follow in the coming months.

The global expansion is being spearheaded by Chris Ciauri, who recently joined Anthropic as managing director of international. A longtime enterprise veteran, Ciauri previously served as CEO of Unily and held senior roles at Google Cloud and Salesforce, where he worked alongside Smith and helped grow Europe, the Middle East and Africa revenue from $200 million to more than $3 billion. 

“G20 governments are approaching us about doing really, really interesting things at a citizen enablement level,” he told CNBC, adding that large companies across Europe and Asia are also now engaging Anthropic on industry-specific use cases.