Anthropic is expanding to Australia and New Zealand by setting up an office in Sydney.
A statement from the AI company says their Sydney office will be their fourth in the Asia-Pacific region (Tokyo, Bengaluru in India, and Seoul) due to strong trans-Tasman demand for their services.
And they are looking at building local computing capacity with partners and possibly building their own data centres in the long-term.
(The US company is also suing the US Defence Department after it was blacklisted for refusing to allow its AI to be used for mass US surveillance or fully autonomous weapons; click here for a link to that story)
The company that operates large language model (LLM) AI assistant Claude is sending a team of executives to Australia at the end of the month to sign deals and meet with politicians.
“We’re excited by the ways organisations in Australia and New Zealand are applying AI to areas of national importance — financial services, agricultural technology, clean energy innovation, healthcare delivery, cutting-edge deep tech and scientific research, along with AI transformation in the enterprise,” said Chris Ciauri, the managing director international for Anthropic.
“Establishing a local presence will help us to develop strong partnerships in ANZ and ensure Claude is built with respect for the unique goals, opportunities, and challenges of the region.”
He says their initial focus will be on supporting enterprise, start-up and research customers.
ANTHROPIC DOWN UNDER
Anthropic already works with the likes of Canva, Quantium and Commonwealth Bank of Australia and with startups pioneering new AI applications across diverse fields such as agtech, physical AI, climate tech and more.
Anthropic says Australia and New Zealand rank 4th and 8th globally in Claude usage (relative to population); its Economic Index shows both countries show strong use of Claude for computer and coding tasks, teaching and research, and they have begun a local team aligned with these trends.
“We’re also exploring opportunities to expand our compute capacity in Australia,” the company statement says.
“We’re exploring adding local capacity through third-party partners in Australia using infrastructure already in place.”
The company says the issue is among the most common raised by Australian businesses and government agencies.
“Beyond that, we’re in early conversations about longer-term infrastructure in the region,” it says.
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