Keir Starmer’s government is dangling sweeteners to get Anthropic, the US start-up valued at $380bn, to bulk up in the UK after a scrap with the US defence department.
Department for Science, Innovation and Technology staff have sketched options from a bigger London office to the long-shot dream of a dual listing, according to people briefed on the plans.
Downing Street has backed the push, and Anthropic, chief executive Dario Amodei is expected to get the pitch when he visits the UK in late May to meet European customers and policymakers.
Officials have cranked up the wooing in recent weeks after the US defence department branded the start-up a supply-chain risk, two of the people said.
US President Donald Trump piled in after Anthropic refused to shift on “red lines” around using its technology for warfighting. “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post at the end of February.
A week later, London mayor Sadiq Khan wrote to Amodei with a steadier sales pitch for the capital. “I believe that London can provide a stable, proportionate and pro-innovation environment in which this kind of AI can flourish,” he wrote.
The scramble sits inside a wider race for “sovereign” AI, with governments trying to cut reliance on foreign labs while pretending it is not a security panic.
Last month, the UK said it would launch a £40mn (€46mn) state-backed research lab for “blue-sky” AI work, aiming at breakthroughs in science, healthcare and transport.
UK officials know they lack a homegrown rival to the top US labs, so they have gone shopping for partnerships instead.
Anthropic employs about 200 people in the UK, including 60 researchers, and last year it hired UK former prime minister Rishi Sunak as a senior adviser.
Rival OpenAI has committed to a major expansion in London, turning the city into its biggest research hub outside the US, which is the sort of competition ministers like because it makes them look busy.
Google has spent years piling into the capital since buying DeepMind, the AI lab founded by DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, in 2014. It is finishing a vast, roughly £1bn (€1.15bn) campus in King’s Cross.
The UK’s courtship comes as Anthropic lines up an initial public offering as early as this year, turning the charm into something more like a pre-roadshow cuddle.
One person familiar with the UK proposals said “the dream” would be to get Anthropic to dual-list in the UK and the US, then admitted it was highly unlikely.
Another government figure said: “We are in regular dialogue with them as you’d expect,” and said the chat was “building on” a memorandum of understanding signed last year on science and a secure AI supply chain.
UK government, business secretary Peter Kyle told the FT: “I set up the Global Talent Taskforce to assertively get out there and sell all the benefits of investing, innovating and scaling in the UK.”
“We are in touch with a great many companies from a very wide range of high-growth sectors worldwide. It’s wrong to say it’s about listing, it’s about talent,” Kyle said.
