Anthropic, the company behind AI-chatbot Claude, eyeing expansion in Seattle’s South Lake Union

The company behind the AI chatbot Claude, Anthropic, is eyeing expansion along the West Coast with more office space in Seattle.

According to The Puget Sound Business Journal, Anthropic is negotiating a 120,000-square-foot lease in South Lake Union, where it already has offices. The AI company, based in San Francisco, wants more space at Dexter Yard, a mixed-use development that opened in 2023. Anthorpic currently has more than 1.1 million square feet of office space in San Francisco.

The deal would put Anthropic in the heart of Seattle’s most tech-heavy neighborhood, just blocks from Apple, Google, and Amazon. Anthropic currently has office space at 400 Fairview.

The AI company wants a larger, more permanent space to draw on local tech talent, according to The Puget Sound Business Journal.

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, has more than 2,000 employees, according to The Information. The company currently has 37 open roles posted in Seattle, as of this reporting.

AI startup Anthropic commits $100 billion to Amazon’s AWS over next 10 years

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to commit more than $100 billion to Amazon’s AWS cloud platform over the next 10 years to train and run its Claude chatbot.

Amazon will invest $5 billion immediately as part of the new agreement announced this week by the companies, and up to another $20 billion in the future. Amazon previously invested $8 billion in Anthropic.

The partnership will allow Anthropic to secure up to 5 gigawatts of Amazon’s Trainium chips to train and power their artificial intelligence models.

“Our custom AI silicon offers high performance at significantly lower cost for customers, which is why it’s in such hot demand,” said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.

Amazon said AWS customers will be able to access the full Anthropic-native Claude console from within the AWS cloud platform.

Earlier this year, privately-held Anthropic said its valuation grew to $380 billion, positioning itself alongside rivals OpenAI and Elon Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX, which recently merged with his AI startup xAI, maker of the chatbot Grok.

Renaissance Capital, which researches the potential for initial public offerings, counts Anthropic as third among the most valuable private firms, behind SpaceX and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, valued at $500 billion.

Anthropic and Amazon have partnered since 2023 to accelerate generative AI adoption for customers to build, deploy, and scale AI applications. Amazon says 100,000 customers run Anthropic Claude models on AWS.

In February, the Trump administration ordered all U.S. agencies to stop using Anthropic’s artificial intelligence technology and imposed other major penalties for refusing to allow the U.S. military unrestricted use of its AI technology.

In an unusually public clash between the government and the company, President Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other officials took to social media to chastise Anthropic, accusing it of endangering national security.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to back down over concerns the company’s products could be used in ways that would violate its safeguards. Anthropic said it would challenge what it called an unprecedented and legally unsound action “never before publicly applied to an American company.”

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court refused to block the Pentagon from blacklisting artificial intelligence laboratory Anthropic in a decision that differed from the conclusions reached in another judge’s ruling on the same issues.

Anthropic is not yet profitable, but said in February that it’s on track for sales of $14 billion over the next year.

Anthropic was founded by ex-OpenAI employees in 2021 and released its first version of Claude in 2023, following OpenAI’s ChatGPT debut in late 2022.

Contributing: The Associated Press

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