Anthropic announced it will triple its international workforce and expand its applied AI team fivefold in 2025 as the company scales its global enterprise ambitions beyond the U.S. The $183 billion AI startup has grown from under 1,000 to more than 300,000 enterprise customers in just two years, with nearly 80% of Claude’s usage now coming from outside America—positioning the company to intensify competition with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google on the international stage.
What you should know: Anthropic is experiencing unprecedented international demand that’s outpacing even their most ambitious forecasts.
- The company is recruiting country leads for India, Australia and New Zealand, Korea, and Singapore, with broader expansion across the UK, northern and southern Europe, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
- Anthropic is opening its first Asia office in Tokyo and scaling operations across Europe, including more than 100 new roles in Dublin and London and a research-focused hub in Zurich.
- On a per-person basis, adoption in countries like South Korea, Australia, and Singapore has already surpassed that of the U.S.
The big picture: The enterprise AI race is entering a more mature and competitive phase as companies shift from experimentation to large-scale implementation.
- Anthropic recently hit a $5 billion revenue run-rate, up from $87 million at the start of 2024, putting it in direct competition with established players.
- OpenAI launched an $850 billion global infrastructure expansion this week with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank, while Microsoft and Google are embedding AI into their entire ecosystems.
- Unlike rivals that offer AI as add-ons to existing software, Anthropic is betting companies want direct access to frontier models rather than wrapped legacy solutions.
Key customer wins: Claude is already delivering measurable results across major international enterprises.
- At Norway’s Norges Bank Investment Management, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, Claude has saved 213,000 hours—a 20% productivity gain across 9,000 portfolio companies.
- Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical giant behind Ozempic, compressed what’s typically a three-month drug development analysis phase into just a few days.
- SK Telecom boosted customer service quality by 34% as part of a company-wide AI overhaul, while the Commonwealth Bank of Australia slashed scam losses by 50%.
What they’re saying: Chief Commercial Officer Paul Smith emphasized the unprecedented nature of international demand.
- “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,” Smith told CNBC.
- “The demand signal we’ve got is unprecedented. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he added. “There isn’t a single enterprise in the world where they don’t have some kind of software development backlog.”
Claude Code momentum: The coding assistant launched in May has become a $500 million product with 10x usage growth in just three months.
- “It’s one of the fastest-growing products that’s ever been launched,” Smith said, calling it “an entry point” that’s proving incredibly popular.
- The tool represents Anthropic’s broader strategy of building deep, domain-specific systems tailored to verticals like telecom, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and government.
International leadership: The global expansion is being led by Chris Ciauri, recently hired as managing director of international.
- Ciauri previously served as CEO of Unily, a workplace collaboration platform, and held senior roles at Google Cloud and Salesforce, where he helped grow EMEA revenue from $200 million to more than $3 billion.
- “G20 governments are approaching us about doing really, really interesting things at a citizen enablement level,” Ciauri told CNBC.
Why this matters: Anthropic’s international surge comes as scrutiny grows around whether enterprise AI deployments are delivering real value, with a recent MIT study finding many so-called implementations show little measurable impact—making Claude’s documented productivity gains across major global enterprises particularly significant for validating the technology’s enterprise potential.
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