Anthropic has acquired Humanloop’s three co-founders—CEO Raza Habib, CTO Peter Hayes, and CPO Jordan Burgess—along with most of its engineering and research team in an acqui-hire deal aimed at strengthening Anthropic’s enterprise AI tooling and safety capabilities. This move does not include acquiring Humanloop’s assets or intellectual property, which is increasingly irrelevant in AI where critical IP often resides in the expertise of the people themselves.
Humanloop was a UK-based AI startup specializing in prompt management, large language model (LLM) evaluation, and observability for enterprise customers such as Duolingo and Gusto. Its tools helped enterprises develop, evaluate, and fine-tune AI applications safely and reliably at scale.
Here is the key points about the acquisition and its strategic impact:
- Anthropic wants to bolster its enterprise AI offering by integrating Humanloop’s experienced team, who bring valuable expertise in AI tooling, continuous model evaluation, and safety workflows.
- This acquire-hire strengthens Anthropic’s position against competitors like OpenAI and Google DeepMind by enhancing the performance, safety, reliability, and compliance capabilities of its AI products.
- Brad Abrams, Anthropic’s API product lead, highlighted that Humanloop’s proven experience will be invaluable in advancing Anthropic’s work in AI safety and building useful AI systems.
- Humanloop’s platform service is being shut down as of September 2025, and customers are encouraged to migrate to other solutions.
- The acquisition underscores the fierce competition for AI talent, with Anthropic prioritizing bringing in top talent to build enterprise-ready AI safety and evaluation tools.
Overall, this strategic hiring move allows Anthropic to significantly boost its enterprise AI tooling ecosystem, enabling it to operationalize AI safety and compete more effectively in the growing market for enterprise AI applications.
Leave a Reply