Anthropic — the artificial intelligence giant suing the Trump administration — is set to open a Sydney office in the coming weeks as it expands its presence across the Asia-Pacific region.
In a statement on Wednesday, Anthropic said the move would make Sydney the company’s fourth office in the region — alongside Tokyo, Bengaluru and Seoul.
Anthropic said the expansion, which had been teased since late last year, reflected strong demand from businesses in Australia and New Zealand.
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Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, Anthropic quickly cemented itself as a rival to the ChatGPT maker with Claude, which is mainly used to help people write computer code.
According to the AI giant, Australia and New Zealand rank fourth and eighth globally for Claude usage relative to population, with strong adoption for coding, education and research tasks.
“We’re excited by the ways organizations in Australia and New Zealand are applying AI to areas of national importance — financial services, agricultural technology, clean energy innovation, healthcare delivery, cutting-edge deep tech and scientific research, along with AI transformation in the enterprise,” Anthropic managing director of international Chris Ciauri said.
The company said its initial focus would be supporting enterprise, startups, and research customers, including Canva, Quantium, and Commonwealth Bank. It was also looking at taking up data centre capacity in Australia.
“We’re also exploring opportunities to expand our compute capacity in Australia — a natural fit given our longstanding belief that democracies should lead in AI development, and one that aligns with the Australian government’s own ambitions to become a trusted destination for sustainable AI infrastructure,” Anthropic said.
Earlier this week, Anthropic sued the US Department of Defence after the government formally tagged the AI company as a supply-chain risk, the kind of label usually reserved for Chinese and Russian firms suspected of helping foreign spies.
The move followed increasingly bitter negotiations over how the company’s technology might be used in warfare, with Anthropic seeking guarantees its Claude model would not be used for mass domestic surveillance or to power fully autonomous weapons.
The unprecedented step by the Pentagon came even as Anthropic’s tools were playing a central role in President Donald Trump’s bombing campaign in Iran.
