Anthropic announced to Euronews Next on Thursday in a Europe exclusive that Neil Houlsby would be leading the new Zürich office.
One of the most influential US artificial intelligence (AI) companies Anthropic has poached a Google DeepMind research scientist to lead its newest European office in Zurich.
Despite having smaller resources, the Claude AI assistant maker is seen as a competitor to larger rivals such as OpenAI and Google’s AI chatbot. Anthropic is valued at around $60 billion (€58 billion), which is almost $100 billion less than OpenAI.
Anthropic calls itself an AI safety research company and was co-founded by former OpenAI executives, researchers, and brother and sister Dario and Daniela Amodei.
It is based in San Francisco and has made various hires from OpenAI among other tech companies.
Anthropic announced to Euronews Next on Thursday in a Europe exclusive that Neil Houlsby, who was previously a research scientist and manager at Google DeepMind, would be joining the company to head the Zürich office.
Prior to his 10 years at Google DeepMind, Houlsby was studying for a PhD in machine learning at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
It is Anthropic’s third European office to open after London in 2023 and Dublin a year later.
“It’s an incredibly exciting time for AI research globally, and Switzerland has long been a centre for super-smart people doing world-class research. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to lead Anthropic’s team in Zürich, where we’re working on further developing multimodal capabilities for Claude’s LLM training,” Houlsby said in a statement.
“We’re already building a strong team in Zürich, and we’re looking for great researchers and engineers to join us – people with a passion for developing AI for the global good and working at the cutting-edge frontier of AI and multimodal LLMs like Claude,” he added.
The announcement comes as the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit was held in Paris this week.
US Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday warned against “excessive regulations” on AI, criticising Europe’s legislation such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) and its online privacy rules.
Anthropic’s CEO, however, said in a statement that “international conversations on AI must more fully address the technology’s growing security risks”.