Anthropic has hired HumanLoop’s CEO along with several team members as it looks to strengthen its enterprise-focused offerings.
HumanLoop is an AI platform used 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, have been brought into Anthropic along with some of the firm’s engineers and researchers, according to a report by TechCrunch.
While the exact terms of the deal are not clear, Humanloop’s assets or its intellectual property are not part of the acquisition, as per a spokesperson for Anthropic.
Anthropic is the latest AI firm to make an acqui-hire style move, bringing over top executives without acquiring the company itself. Meta and Google have made similar moves amid an escalating war for AI talent.
Anthropic’s AI models and tools are said to be popular among enterprises due to their advanced agentic and coding capabilities. With HumanLoop’s leadership, the Amazon-backed company is likely looking to bolster the performance, safety, and reliability of its enterprise AI products. This would likely give Anthropic an edge over rivals in the enterprise AI segment 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,” Brad Abrams, API product lead at Anthropic, was quoted as saying.
“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,” Raza Habib, former CEO of Humanloop, said in a statement.
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Founded in 2020, HumanLoop has participated in startup accelerator programmes by Y Combinator and Fuse Incubator. It has reportedly closed two funding rounds led by YC and Index Ventures, successfully raising $7.91 million in seed funding.
Some of HumanLoop’s enterprise customers include Duolingo, Gusto, and Vanta. The startup had reportedly informed customers last month that it would be non-operational in preparation for an acquisition.
Besides acqui-hiring HumanLoop executives, Anthropic has sought to woo its enterprise clients by making context windows longer as well as improving the capabilities of its AI models.
Earlier this week, Anthropic said it will offer its Claude AI model to the US government for $1. OpenAI also announced a similar offer recently, wherein ChatGPT Enterprise has been made available to participating US federal agencies for $1 per agency for the next year.