Just ahead of its blowout first-quarter earnings report last week, Google laid off at least 200 employees from its “Core” teams, in a reorganization that will include moving some roles to India and Mexico, CNBC has learned.

Google’s Core unit is responsible for building the technical foundation behind the company’s flagship products and protecting users’ online safety, according to Google’s website. Core teams include key technical units from information technology, its Python developer team, technical infrastructure, security foundation, app platforms, core developers and various engineering roles.

At least 50 of the positions eliminated were in engineering at the company’s offices in Sunnyvale, California, filings show. Many of the Core teams will hire corresponding roles in Mexico and India, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC.

Asim Husain, vice president of Google Developer Ecosystem, announced some of the layoffs to his team in an email last week. He also spoke at a town hall and told employees that this was the biggest planned reduction for his team this year, an internal document shows.

“We intend to maintain our current global footprint while also expanding in high-growth global workforce locations so that we can operate closer to our partners and developer communities,” Husain wrote in the email.

Alphabet has been slashing headcount since early last year, when the company announced plans to eliminate about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, following a downturn in the online ad market. Even with digital advertising rebounding in the past couple quarters, Alphabet has continued downsizing, with layoffs across multiple organizations this year.

CFO Ruth Porat announced in mid-April a restructuring to the company’s finance department, which included layoffs and moving positions to Bangalore and Mexico City. The company’s search boss, Prabhakar Raghavan, told employees at an all-hands meeting in March that Google plans to build teams closer to users in key markets, including India and Brazil, where labor is cheaper than in the U.S.

The latest cuts comes as the company enjoys its fastest growth rate since early 2022, alongside improving profit margins. Last week, Alphabet reported a 15% jump in first-quarter revenue from a year earlier, and announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion buyback.  

“Announcements of this sort may leave many of you feeling uncertain or frustrated,” Husain wrote in the email to developers. He added that his message to developers is that the changes “are in service of our broader goals” as a company.

The teams involved in the reorganization have been key to the company’s developer tools, an area that’s being streamlined by Google as it incorporates more AI into the products. In February, Google announced a major rebrand of its chatbot from Bard to Gemini, the same name as the suit of AI models that power it.

Alphabet is gearing up for its annual developer conference, Google I/O, on May 14, where the company traditionally reveals new developer products and tools that have been underway during the prior year. Husain said in a memo explaining the developer changes that generative AI is at an “inflection point.”

“Recent advances in Generative AI across the industry, including Google’s Gemini, are changing the very nature of software development as we know it,” Husain wrote.

In a separate email, security engineering vice president Pankaj Rohatgi, told his team that, “In order to optimize for our business goals, we are expanding work to other locations, which will result in some role eliminations and proposed role eliminations.”

The Core layoffs also include the governance and protected data group, which will be at the center of regulatory challenges facing the company, particularly as lawmakers across the globe focus more on developments in AI. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) went into effect in March, and is aimed at clamping down on anti-competitive practices in tech.

Evan Kotsovinos, Google’s vice president of governance and protected data, wrote about the upcoming changes in an email last week.

Kotsovinos said the team’s success means responding to “escalating regulatory focus” and is contingent on “moving faster.”

Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president overseeing search, recently referenced heightened competition, a more challenging regulatory environment and slower organic growth as the company’s “new operating reality.”

Google confirmed the Core reorganization and layoffs, and a spokesperson told CNBC that employees will be able to apply for open roles within Google and to access outplacement services.

“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” the spokesperson said in an email. “A number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers and align their resources to their biggest product priorities.”

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Anthropic on Wednesday announced its first-ever enterprise offering and a free iPhone app.

The generative artificial intelligence startup is the company behind Claude, one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google‘s Gemini, has exploded in popularity in the past year. Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, has backers including Google, Salesforce and Amazon, and in the past year, it’s closed five different funding deals totaling about $7.3 billion.

The new plan for businesses, dubbed Team, has been in development over the last few quarters and involved beta-testing with between 30 and 50 customers in industries such as technology, financial services, legal services and health care, Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei told CNBC in an interview, adding that the idea for the service was partially borne out of many of those same customers asking for a dedicated enterprise product.

“So much of what we were hearing from enterprise businesses is people are kind of using Claude at the office already,” Amodei said.

The Team plan offers access to all three of Anthropic’s latest Claude models, with increased usage limits, admin tools and billing management, as well as a longer “context window,” meaning the ability for businesses to have “multi-step conversations” and upload long documents like research papers and legal contracts for processing, according to Anthropic. Other features coming include “citations from reliable sources to verify AI generated claims,” per the release.

The Team offering costs $30 per user per month when billed monthly. It requires a minimum of five users.

News of the Team plan and iOS app comes more than a month after Anthropic’s debut of Claude 3, a suite of AI models that it says are its fastest and most powerful yet. The new tools are called Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet and Haiku.

The company has said the most capable of the new models, Claude 3 Opus, outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini Ultra on industry benchmark tests, such as undergraduate-level knowledge, graduate level reasoning and basic mathematics. This is also the first time Anthropic has offered multimodal support: Users can upload photos, charts, documents and other types of unstructured data for analysis and answers.

The other models, Sonnet and Haiku, are more compact and less expensive than Opus. The company declined to specify how long it took to train Claude 3 or how much it cost, but it said companies like Airtable and Asana helped A/B test the models. In a release on Wednesday, Anthropic confirmed that other current clients using Claude include Pfizer, Asana, Zoom, Perplexity AI, Bridgewater Associates and more currently.

The generative AI field has exploded over the past year, with a record $29.1 billion invested across nearly 700 deals in 2023, a more than 260% increase in deal value from a year earlier, according to PitchBook. It’s become the buzziest phrase on corporate earnings calls quarter after quarter. Academics and ethicists have voiced significant concerns about the technology’s tendency to propagate bias, but even so, it’s quickly made its way into schools, online travel, the medical industry, online advertising and more.

Around this time last year, Anthropic had completed Series A and B funding rounds, but it had only rolled out the first version of its chatbot without any consumer access or major fanfare. Now, it’s one of the hottest AI startups, with a product that directly competes with ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer worlds.

Claude 3 can summarize up to about 150,00 words, or a sizeable book, about the length range of “Moby Dick” or “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” Its previous version could only summarize 75,000 words. Users can input large data sets, and ask for summaries in the form of a memo, letter or story. ChatGPT, by contrast, can handle about 3,000 words.

In January, OpenAI came under fire regarding its enterprise offering, for quietly walking back a ban on the military use of ChatGPT and its other artificial intelligence tools. Its policies still state that users should not “use our service to harm yourself or others,” including to “develop or use weapons.” Before the change, OpenAI’s policy page specified that the company did not allow the usage of its models for “activity that has high risk of physical harm, including: weapons development [and] military and warfare.”

Anthropic’s stance on the military use of Claude is similar to OpenAI’s updated policy.

“The way that we draw the line there today is we don’t discriminate based on industry or based on business, but we have an acceptable use policy that says what you can and can’t use Claude for,” Amodei told CNBC, adding, “Any business in the world that’s not in a sanctioned country, of course, [and] meets basic business requirements, can use Claude for all kinds of back-office applications and things like that, but we have… very strict guidance around Claude not being used for weapons, basically anything that can cause violence or harm people.”