Anthropic Acquires HumanLoop Executives to Boost Enterprise AI
Anthropic has hired HumanLoop’s CEO along with several key team members to enhance its enterprise AI offerings. HumanLoop is a platform designed for evaluation and observability of large language models (LLMs) as well as prompt management. The company’s three co-founders CEO Raza Habib, CTO Peter Hayes, and CPO Jordan Burgess joined Anthropic, along with select engineers and researchers, according to TechCrunch.
Although the exact terms remain undisclosed, HumanLoop’s assets and intellectual property are not included in this acqui-hire, a spokesperson confirmed. As a result, the move focuses primarily on talent acquisition rather than company acquisition.
A Strategic Move in Enterprise AI Competition
Anthropic is the latest AI company to use an acqui-hire strategy, following similar moves by Meta and Google amid a growing competition for AI talent. The company’s AI models and tools are already popular among enterprises for their advanced agentic and coding capabilities. With HumanLoop’s leadership, Anthropic is expected to improve the performance, safety, and reliability of its enterprise AI offerings, potentially gaining an edge over competitors such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
“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,” said Brad Abrams, API product lead at Anthropic.
“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,” stated Raza Habib, former CEO of HumanLoop.
HumanLoop’s Legacy and Anthropic’s Expansion
Founded in 2020, HumanLoop participated in Y Combinator and Fuse Incubator programs and raised $7.91 million in seed funding from YC and Index Ventures. Its enterprise clients included Duolingo, Gusto, and Vanta. Last month, HumanLoop informed customers that it would halt operations in preparation for the acqui-hire.
Beyond acquiring talent, Anthropic has been enhancing its enterprise offerings by increasing context window lengths and improving AI model capabilities. Earlier this week, the company announced it will offer its Claude AI model to the US government for $1, a move similar to OpenAI’s recent ChatGPT Enterprise offer for participating federal agencies.
