Anthropic Plans Major International Expansion

Anthropic is significantly escalating its ambitions in the global enterprise AI space.

The burgeoning AI startup, valued at $183 billion, has witnessed exponential growth in its business customer base, expanding from under 1,000 to over 300,000 in the past two years. This surge in adoption is fueled by the escalating demand for Anthropic’s Claude family of models across diverse industries and geographical regions.

In a strategic move announced Friday, Anthropic revealed plans to triple its international workforce and quintuple its applied AI team in 2025. This expansion signals a determined effort to scale beyond its U.S. stronghold and intensify its competitive stance against industry giants such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.

This expansion is driven by surging international demand. According to Anthropic’s internal metrics, nearly 80% of Claude’s activity now originates from outside the United States. Notably, per-person adoption rates in countries like South Korea, Australia, and Singapore have already surpassed those in the U.S., underscoring the global appetite for its AI solutions.

Speaking exclusively with CNBC, Paul Smith, Chief Commercial Officer at Anthropic, emphasized that the company’s international growth is exceeding even the most optimistic projections. He noted that this momentum is happening despite only recently establishing a significant on-the-ground presence in key international markets.

“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 further highlighted strong adoption rates in sectors such as life sciences and sovereign wealth management.

Smith cited Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical behemoth responsible for Ozempic, as a prime example. Claude facilitated a dramatic reduction in the analysis and reporting phase of drug development, compressing a process that typically spanned three months into a mere few days. This demonstrates the potential for Anthropic’s models to deliver substantial efficiency gains in highly regulated and complex industries.

Anthropic is now aggressively recruiting country leads for key markets including India, Australia and New Zealand, Korea, and Singapore. Broader expansion is planned across the UK, northern and southern Europe, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. These recruitment efforts reflect a targeted approach to cater to the specific needs and regulatory landscapes of diverse regions.

As part of its worldwide push, Anthropic is establishing its inaugural Asia office in Tokyo and scaling operations throughout Europe, which includes over 100 new roles in Dublin and London plus a research-oriented operations in Zurich. Additional sites across the globe are likely to follow soon.

Chris Ciauri, former CEO of Unily and a veteran of Google Cloud and Salesforce, is leading the global rollout, having recently joined Anthropic as managing director of international. Ciauri previously collaborated with Smith at Salesforce, where he played a pivotal role in increasing EMEA revenue from $200 million to exceed $3 billion.

“G20 governments are approaching us about doing really, really interesting things at a citizen enablement level,” Ciauri told CNBC, emphasizing the growing interest from both governmental bodies and large corporations across Europe and Asia in leveraging Anthropic’s technology for industry-specific applications.

Anthropic’s aggressive international expansion comes at a pivotal moment as the enterprise AI landscape intensifies. The company’s recent revenue performance underscores its growing market traction. Anthropic has achieved a $5 billion revenue run-rate after its $87 million at early 2024 pushed by greater demand for its Claude family of models in enterprise settings.

That milestone puts Anthropic squarely in competition with the incumbents.

OpenAI this week launched an $850 billion global infrastructure expansion with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank to support continued growth. Microsoft and Google, meanwhile, are embedding AI into every layer of their productivity, cloud, and developer ecosystems — making it easier for CIOs to tack on tools like Copilot or Gemini without overhauling their existing systems.

Anthropic’s strategic differentiation lies in its focus on delivering a pure-play AI experience. Unlike competitors that primarily offer AI as an add-on to existing software suites, Anthropic is positioning itself as a provider of choice for those looking for direct access to Claude’s frontier models. This strategy appeals to enterprises seeking to move beyond experimentation and implement AI at scale.

Smith said that the company is finding that most large enterprises are adopting hybrid strategies, which combine direct access to Claude with integrations through AWS, Google Cloud, and other third-party platforms, and emphasized that these partnerships are additive, not competitive.

“There’s a very good reason why, if you’re an AWS customer, you should also consume Anthropic through Bedrock — and if you’re a great Google customer, through Vertex,” he said.

Ultimately, he said, an enterprise will have a multi-faceted relationship with a player like Anthropic.

To support this enterprise-centric approach, Anthropic is significantly scaling its applied AI team, which is responsible for assisting customers in deploying Claude at scale. The company’s focus is on constructing focused, domain-specific systems tailored to verticals such as telecom, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and government.

“You need the applied AI team that understands their particular industry context,” Smith said. A wider ecosystem of large organizations with global systems and niche consultants trained to use bespoke Claude Code are needed for implementation in enterprise deployment, he elaborated.

Anthropic is also investing in 24/7 support and infrastructure for data sovereignty — especially important for customers in regulated sectors.

“We’re meticulously working through everything that you need that removes the barriers to adoption in these very large enterprises,” Smith said, emphasizing that enterprise isn’t just one part of their business, it’s the entire focus.

At the same time, OpenAI has been aggressively scaling its international enterprise efforts.

OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap has grown the company’s go-to-market team from about 50 to more than 700 over the past 18 months, spanning sales, customer success, developer relations, and strategic partnerships.

Last month, OpenAI opened offices in Brazil, India, and Australia — and this week in Abilene, Texas, CEO Sam Altman told CNBC that usage of ChatGPT has surged roughly tenfold over the past 18 months, thanks in large part to growth on the enterprise side.

That momentum continued on Thursday, when OpenAI deepened its enterprise reach with a formal integration into Databricks — signaling a new phase in its push for commercial adoption.

As enterprise AI adoption accelerates, scrutiny is also on the rise. Although a recent MIT study called into question just how deeply these technologies are being utilized, Anthropic executives assert that Claude is already generating clear, tangible outcomes on a global scale.

Claude is powering important business operations in several businesses throughout Europe and Asia-Pacific. At Norway’s Norges Bank Investment Management, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, Claude is used to analyze multi-billion-dollar investments, helping to save 213,000 hours and resulting in a 20% rise in productivity across 9,000 portfolio companies.

Novo Nordisk reduced clinical documentation time from more than 10 weeks to 10 minutes and halved review cycles. SK Telecom, which is deploying Claude in Korea as part of a company-wide AI overhaul, boosted customer service quality by 34%. The European Parliament made millions of historical documents searchable and translatable, and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia slashed scam losses by 50%.

“The demand signal we’ve got is unprecedented. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” said Smith. “There isn’t a single enterprise in the world where they don’t have some kind of software development backlog.”

Smith said Claude Code, launched in May, is already a $500 million product, with usage up 10x in just three months.

“It’s one of the fastest-growing products that’s ever been launched,” he said. “It’s an entry point. Happens to be an incredibly popular entry point right now.”

But the impact goes well beyond software development.

Ciauri pointed to Panasonic’s Claude deployment as showing a dedication to localization, which is linguistic and cultural, claiming that this focus is a unique selling point. He cited a Japanese conglomerate that leverages models adapted to local linguistic and cultural contexts.

“That’s a super important differentiator as you think about how you really maximize results for enterprise,” said Ciauri.

“You get these pockets of success,” Smith added, “that you can then start to scale.”