Anthropic Acquires Humanloop Team in Strategic Move to Bolster Enterprise AI Capabilities

Anthropic nabs Humanloop team as competition for enterprise AI talent heats up | TechCrunch

Anthropic has acquired the co-founders and most of the team behind Humanloop - a platform for prompt management, LLM evaluation, and observability - in a push to strengthen its enterprise strategy. The terms of the deal were not shared, but it appears to follow the acqui-hire playbook we're increasingly seeing in the tech industry amid the war for AI talent. Humanloop's three co-founders - CEO Raza Habib, CTO Peter Hayes, and CPO Jordan Burgess - have all joined Anthropic, alongside around a dozen engineers and researchers. Anthropic is growing fast in the enterprise space as it leads in agentic and coding capabilities. While an Anthropic spokesperson confirmed that the AI firm did not acquire Humanloop's assets or its intellectual property, that's a moot point in an industry where IP lives in the brain. And what Humanloop's team is bringing to Anthropic is experience developing the tools that help enterprises run safe, reliable AI at scale. Or as Brad Abrams, API product lead at Anthropic, put it: "Their proven experience in AI tooling and evaluation will be invaluable as we continue to advance our work in AI safety and building useful AI systems." In a market where model quality alone isn't enough to stay competitive, bolstering its tooling ecosystem could position Anthropic to cement its lead over OpenAI and Google DeepMind in both performance and enterprise readiness. Humanloop was founded in 2020 as a University College London spinout. The startup then went on to participate in Y Combinator and the Fuse Incubator before raising $7.91 million in seed funding across two rounds led by YC and Index Ventures, per PitchBook. Humanloop gained a reputation for helping enterprise customers - including Duolingo, Gusto, and Vanta - develop, evaluate, and fine-tune robust AI applications. Last month, Humanloop told customers that it would be shutting down in preparation for an acquisition. The timing of this acqui-hire comes as Anthropic offers features like longer context windows to enterprise clients, improving what its models are capable of and where they can be applied. Earlier this week, Anthropic reached a deal with the U.S. government's central purchasing arm to sell its AI services to government agencies across executive, judiciary, and legislative branches for just $1 per agency for the first year - a clear move to undercut OpenAI's similarly priced offering. Both government and enterprise buyers demand the type of evaluation, monitoring, and compliance features that Humanloop specialized in. The acquisition is also on brand for Anthropic as it bills itself as a "safety-first" AI company. Humanloop's evaluation workflows align with that mission by providing constant performance measurement, safety guardrails, and bias mitigation. "From our earliest days, we've been focused on creating tools that help developers build AI applications safely and effectively," said Raza Habib, former CEO of Humanloop, in a statement. "Anthropic's commitment to AI safety research and responsible AI development perfectly aligns with our vision."

AI Acqui-hiring spree continues with Anthropic snapping up Humanloop team

From left: Peter Hayes, Jordan Burgess and Raza Habib. Image: Humanloop The part Irish-founded UK AI start-up Humanloop has wound down with its three co-founders and most of its engineering team being bought by Anthropic. Having signalled it was shutting down ahead of an acquisition last month, it has now been confirmed that Humanloop's three co-founders - CEO Raza Habib, CTO Irish man Peter Hayes, and CPO Jordan Burgess - have all gone to Anthropic, as well as most of its engineering and research team. An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that it had not acquired Humanloop's assets or its intellectual property, a pretty moot point given that most of the IP is likely to live in the heads of its founders and key staff. It appears to be part of a new trend in the AI talent war, with recent such acqui-hire deals as Google swooping in to bring Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and other members of the coding tool's R&D team to Google Deepmind AI. OpenAI had been attempting to finalise a deal with Windsurf at the time. Founded out of University College London, the AI enterprise tooling spinout later participated in Y Combinator (YC) and the Fuse Incubator, and raised nearly $8m seed funding in rounds let by YC and the Fuse Incubator. Humanloop has worked with enterprise clients from Duolingo to Vanta and specialises in LLM evaluation, and observability. In a statement on their website attributed to the Humanloop founders and "the whole humanloop team", they said they were announcing "the Humanloop team is joining Anthropic". "From the start, our mission at Humanloop has been to enable the safe and rapid adoption of AI," it read. "Now, as the pace of AI progress accelerates, we think Anthropic is the ideal home to amplify our impact. "We are grateful to our investors: Albion, Index, YC, Local Globe, UCLTF and many fantastic angels," the statement continued, although it seems likely these investors have been burnt in the deal - no financial details were disclosed. "Building this company has been an incredible journey and we were fortunate to have investors who trusted and supported us at every step." They went on to say that they were very proud of what they had built at Humanloop. "We were the first development platform for LLM applications and we shaped industry standards for how to manage and evaluate AI," they said. "We're excited about this next chapter, joining Anthropic to help build an AI future that benefits everyone." Anthropic was founded by siblings and Open AI alumni Dario and Daniela Amodei. Still a private company, it was built on the principles of responsible AI, although many commentators have questioned the ability of any AI player to be truly ethical. In recent years it has received funding from the likes of Amazon and Google, drawing ire from online purists. In July it was reported that Anthropic was raising as much as $5bn in a round led by global investment firm Iconiq Capital, a deal that would value the start-up at $170bn, seeing it catching up with the likes of OpenAI which is valued at $300bn, the Chinese TikTok-owner ByteDance at $312bn and SpaceX, which stands at about $400bn. Anthropic announced plans to create more than 100 new jobs across its European offices in May, with a primary focus on hiring in Dublin and London. The company opened its first EU office last year in Dublin, to support its European expansion. The start-up released its Claude 4 models in May, claiming that Claude Opus 4 was the "best coding model in the world". Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Anthropic talent hiring: AI startup Anthropic hires HumanLoop cofounders and senior team - The Economic Times

AI startup Anthropic has hired three cofounders and several senior staff from London-based AI startup HumanLoop, according to news site Sifted. Anthropic hiring: Who are the new hires? The new hires include HumanLoop CEO Raza Habib, CTO Peter Hayes, CPO Jordan Burgess, along with most of the engineering and research team. In July, HumanLoop informed customers that it would be shutting down its platform after entering a process to be acquired. However, Anthropic has only hired employees from HumanLoop and has not acquired the company or its intellectual property. Also Read: Anthropic to offer Claude to Trump administration for $1 HumanLoop, founded in 2020 at University College London, developed an enterprise AI platform that helped customers evaluate and integrate large language models at scale. It has received support from major venture capital firms such as Y Combinator, Index Ventures, and Albion. Brad Abrams, Anthropic's API product lead, told Sifted: "We're thrilled to welcome the Humanloop founders and team members to Anthropic. Their proven experience in AI tooling and evaluation will be invaluable as we continue to advance our work in AI safety and building useful AI systems." Habib added, "From our earliest days, we've been focused on creating tools that help developers build AI applications safely and effectively. Anthropic's commitment to AI safety research and responsible AI development perfectly aligns with our vision." As competition for AI talent intensifies, US tech companies are increasingly turning to Europe for skilled professionals, often acquiring startups just to gain access to their teams or hire entire teams without buying the companies. For example, Microsoft hired the cofounders of London-based video generation platform Haiper in March, and Salesforce acquired the London AI startup Convergence in May. In addition, a shake-up in top AI talent is underway, with employees moving between major tech companies such as Meta, Microsoft and Google. These companies are competing to attract the best minds, even offering substantial compensation packages to retain them. All of this is aimed at achieving milestones such as artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence.