Anthropic is stepping up its global enterprise ambitions.

The $183 billion artificial intelligence startup has grown its business customer base from under 1,000 to more than 300,000 in just two years, as demand for Claude‘s models accelerates across industries and regions.

On Friday, the company announced it will triple its international workforce and expand its applied AI team fivefold in 2025, as it scales beyond the U.S. and intensifies competition with OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.

That expansion comes as international demand increasingly drives the company’s momentum.

Claude’s global usage has reached an inflection point: nearly 80% of activity now comes from outside the United States. On a per-person basis, adoption in countries like South Korea, Australia and Singapore has already surpassed that of the U.S.

In an exclusive interview, Chief Commercial Officer Paul Smith told CNBC that Anthropic’s international growth is outpacing even their most ambitious forecasts, with major customers coming online well before boots hit the ground. 

“What is amazing is we haven’t, up until recently, had significant human presence in Europe, in Japan, in our international markets, and yet we already have a very, very significant business over there,” said Smith. 

He pointed to rapid adoption in sectors like life sciences and sovereign wealth management.

At Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical giant behind Ozempic, Claude helped compress what’s typically a three-month analysis and reporting phase at the end of a drug development cycle into just a few days.

Smith said Anthropic is now ramping up hiring across its priority global markets.

The company is recruiting country leads for India, Australia and New Zealand, Korea, and Singapore, with broader expansion underway across the UK, northern and southern Europe, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

As part of its international push, Anthropic is opening its first Asia office in Tokyo and scaling operations across Europe — including more than 100 new roles in Dublin and London and a research-focused hub in Zurich. Additional locations are expected to follow in the coming months.

The global expansion is being spearheaded by Chris Ciauri, who recently joined Anthropic as managing director of international. A longtime enterprise veteran, Ciauri previously served as CEO of Unily and held senior roles at Google Cloud and Salesforce, where he worked alongside Smith and helped grow EMEA revenue from $200 million to more than $3 billion. 

“G20 governments are approaching us about doing really, really interesting things at a citizen enablement level,” he told CNBC, adding that large companies across Europe and Asia are also now engaging Anthropic on industry-specific use cases.

OpenAI this week launched an $850 billion global infrastructure expansion with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank to support continued growth. Microsoft and Google, meanwhile, are embedding AI into every layer of their productivity, cloud, and developer ecosystems — making it easier for CIOs to tack on tools like Copilot or Gemini without overhauling their stack.

Anthropic is betting that companies want more than an add-on.

The pitch is a pure-play AI experience, with direct access to Claude’s frontier models — not just a wrapper inside legacy software. That strategy has become a key point of differentiation as enterprises shift from experimentation to implementation at scale.

Across sectors, organizations are now embedding AI into core workflows, not just for summarization or chat, but for tasks like customer service, fraud detection, regulatory analysis, code review, and complex decision-making.

Still, Smith said most large enterprises are adopting hybrid strategies combining direct access to Claude with integrations through AWS, Google Cloud, and other third-party platforms, and emphasized that these partnerships are additive, not competitive.

“There’s a very good reason why, if you’re an AWS customer, you should also consume Anthropic through Bedrock — and if you’re a great Google customer, through Vertex,” he said. 

Ultimately, he said, an enterprise will have a multi-faceted relationship with a player like Anthropic.

Anthropic’s applied AI team, which helps customers deploy Claude at scale, is set to grow fivefold in the next year.

Unlike some rivals, the company doesn’t rely on productivity suite integration or a legacy install base. Its focus is on building deep, domain-specific systems tailored to verticals like telecom, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and government.

“You need the applied AI team that understands their particular industry context,” Smith said.

He explained that true enterprise deployment also requires a broader ecosystem: both large global systems integrators and niche consultancies trained to implement Claude Code and build custom agents.

Anthropic is also investing in 24/7 support and infrastructure for data sovereignty — especially important for customers in regulated sectors.

“We’re meticulously working through everything that you need that removes the barriers to adoption in these very large enterprises,” Smith said, emphasizing that enterprise isn’t just one part of their business, it’s the entire focus.

At the same time, OpenAI has been aggressively scaling its international enterprise efforts.

OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap has grown the company’s go-to-market team from about 50 to more than 700 over the past 18 months, spanning sales, customer success, developer relations, and strategic partnerships. 

Last month, OpenAI opened offices in Brazil, India, and Australia — and this week in Abilene, Texas, CEO Sam Altman told CNBC that usage of ChatGPT has surged roughly tenfold over the past 18 months, thanks in large part to growth on the enterprise side.

That momentum continued on Thursday, when OpenAI deepened its enterprise reach with a formal integration into Databricks — signaling a new phase in its push for commercial adoption.

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