Anthropic Recruits Monzo Co-Founder to Tackle Compute Issues

Anthropic has reportedly hired Monzo Co-Founder/Former CEO Tom Blomfield to strengthen its compute team.

That’s according to a post Monday (July 13) from LinkedIn news, which noted that his hiring comes amid increasing competition for leading AI talent.

Blomfield said he is taking a leave of absence from his position as general partner at startup accelerator Y Combinator, and will focus on compute availability issues while Anthropic continues to expand and advance its AI capabilities, the report said.

The report noted that his recruitment follows some high-profile hires by Anthropic from competitors OpenAI and Google DeepMind in the last few months. It also contains some perspectives from industry experts on the move.

Among them is Gail Weiner, founder of the U.K.’s AI Trust Architect, who said the hiring might seem like an “odd fit,” given Blomfield’s background in consumer FinTech.

“But look at what compute actually is at Anthropic now: commitments to a million Google TPUs, multiple gigawatts of capacity coming online, deals worth tens of billions,” she wrote. “That stopped being a purely technical problem some time ago. It’s a commercial and operational problem, and Anthropic went and got someone who built a regulated bank from nothing, where reliability and trust were conditions of existing at all, not features to add later.”

Anthropic’s other recent high-profile hires include picking Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and head of AI at Tesla, to join the startup’s pretraining team focused on advancing large language model research.

And in April, Microsoft executive Eric Boyd announced he would be joining Anthropic to lead the company’s infrastructure team.

In other Anthropic news, the company announced last week that it was making its agentic experience, Claude Cowork, available on mobile and web in beta for members of its Max plan and expects to expand access to additional plans.

“Everyone asks AI for answers. Handing it the work is different, and people keep giving Claude bigger jobs,” Anthropic said in a blog post. “Work like that doesn’t fit in one sitting. It accumulates overnight, between meetings, on the train. Until today, Cowork lived on your laptop, so the work stopped when you stepped away. Now it doesn’t.”

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence found that Claude stands among AI tools out for its perceived workplace value. Eighty-one percent of workers who use Claude said AI is either essential to their job or substantially improves their productivity.

That figure places the tool above five others that were included in the study: Perplexity, Meta AI, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.