The founder of online bank Monzo has become the latest high-profile figure to join Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot.<\/p>\n
Tom Blomfield, who is one of Britain\u2019s 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\u2019s most valuable AI company<\/a>.<\/p>\n In a post on X, Mr Blomfield said he would be working on Anthropic\u2019s compute team with Tom Brown, one of the company\u2019s co-founders. Anthropic\u2019s compute team is responsible for securing the hardware and infrastructure needed for its AI systems.<\/p>\n He wrote: \u201cPowerful 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr Blomfield is best known for starting online bank Monzo in 2015 and serving as its chief executive until 2020.<\/p>\n He grew the company from a scrappy digital challenger into a major force in banking with more than 15 million customers and \u00a325bn in deposits.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n He quit London for San Francisco after voicing criticism of Britain\u2019s approach to tech companies and entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n Speaking in 2021, he said: \u201cThat ambition and that sort of belief that you can achieve anything I think is very, very powerful and intoxicating and doesn\u2019t exist as much in London.<\/p>\n \u201cThe US capital markets at IPO [initial public offering] stage are much, much deeper and much more accepting of high-growth tech companies. I don\u2019t think that is going to change anytime soon.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n The San Francisco-based tech giant hired John Jumper, the Nobel prize-winning chemist and former director of Google\u2019s DeepMind, last month. Rishi Sunak, the former prime minister, also joined Anthropic as an adviser last year.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n