The founder of online bank Monzo has become the latest high-profile figure to join Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot.
Tom Blomfield, who is one of Britain’s most successful tech entrepreneurs, will take a leave of absence from his current role at start-up investor Y Combinator to join Anthropic, which recently overtook OpenAI as the world’s most valuable AI company.
In a post on X, Mr Blomfield said he would be working on Anthropic’s compute team with Tom Brown, one of the company’s co-founders. Anthropic’s compute team is responsible for securing the hardware and infrastructure needed for its AI systems.
He wrote: “Powerful AI has the potential to improve the life of every human on earth and as we enter the early stages of recursive self-improvement, availability of compute becomes one of the most important issues to solve.”
Mr Blomfield is best known for starting online bank Monzo in 2015 and serving as its chief executive until 2020.
He grew the company from a scrappy digital challenger into a major force in banking with more than 15 million customers and £25bn in deposits.
After leaving Monzo in 2021, Mr Blomfield joined Y Combinator, which was an investor in both Monzo and GoCardless, another fintech company he helped launch in 2011.
He quit London for San Francisco after voicing criticism of Britain’s approach to tech companies and entrepreneurs.
Speaking in 2021, he said: “That ambition and that sort of belief that you can achieve anything I think is very, very powerful and intoxicating and doesn’t exist as much in London.
“The US capital markets at IPO [initial public offering] stage are much, much deeper and much more accepting of high-growth tech companies. I don’t think that is going to change anytime soon.”
Mr Blomfield is the latest in a string of high-profile new recruits at Anthropic as it competes with rivals including ChatGPT-maker OpenAI in a rapidly escalating arms race to build sophisticated AI models.
The San Francisco-based tech giant hired John Jumper, the Nobel prize-winning chemist and former director of Google’s DeepMind, last month. Rishi Sunak, the former prime minister, also joined Anthropic as an adviser last year.
Anthropic, which is led by Dario Amodei, is gearing up for a $1tn stock market listing. The company filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month to begin the process of an initial public offering.
Rival OpenAI is also preparing for its own stock market debut as the two companies vie to get ahead during the AI boom.
Mr Amodei, a former OpenAI employee, founded Anthropic after he quit the rival lab because of concerns about its approach to AI safety under Sam Altman, its boss.