Tom Blomfield, the entrepreneur who created Britain’s best-known digital bank Monzo, has been hired by Anthropic, the artificial intelligence group behind the Claude AI models, in the latest sign that the world’s leading AI labs are raising the talent of Britain’s most ambitious business.
Blomfield, 40, said he will take a break from his role as a partner at Y Combinator, the US startup investor behind Airbnb, Stripe and Coinbase, to join the Anthropic compute team. Compute is the industry term for the hardware, software and data center infrastructure required to train and run AI models.
Writing in X, Blomfield said: “Powerful AI has the potential to improve the lives of everyone on the planet and, as we enter the early stages of its development, computing becomes one of the most important problems to solve. I’m excited to get started.”
He will work with Tom Brown, Anthropic’s co-founder and chief computing officer. The hire is a coup for Anthropic, which this year overtook OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable private AI business.
For UK business owners relocation carries a familiar sting. Blomfield is one of the most influential angel investors in start-up companies, and his energy now permeates the American lab rather than the British start-up scene.
It also underscores just how fierce the battle for elite AI talent has become. Tech groups including Meta and Alphabet, and dedicated AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI, are competing fiercely for researchers as they race to build next-generation systems.
Last month Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher who founded OpenAI, joined Anthropic to work on “pre-training” that supports AI model development. He was joined by John Jumper, a Nobel prize-winning scientist who co-developed AlphaFold at Google DeepMind, an AI breakthrough that has predicted more than 200 million protein structures. A few days ago, Noam Shazeer, Google’s vice president of engineering and lead for its Gemini models, said he would be leaving to join OpenAI. Rishi Sunak, a former prime minister, joined Anthropic as a consultant last year.
The numbers are growing because both Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing for blockbuster floats, with OpenAI already including a private IPO, at a time when concerns are growing about a valuation bubble.
Blomfield launched Monzo, now widely expected to be a candidate for flotation, in 2015, after founding GoCardless, a payments company that recently approved sales worth around £1bn. He left Monzo in 2021 and has spoken openly about the terrible toll the illness has taken on his mental health.
His departure from Anthropic will reignite the uncomfortable debate he has led in the past. Writing in the Times in 2024, he said: “Our national mentality does not allow for the celebration of entrepreneurship, we are very risk-averse, and most of the smart, tech-savvy young people in the UK want to be lawyers or consultants or work in finance.”
When he joined Y Combinator in 2023, he said that there are many opportunities for entrepreneurs in the United States, and that the problems of the attraction of the London public market for technology businesses are “very real”. That criticism is still coming: ministers are now investing directly to maintain a list of London’s fastest-growing AI firms.
Blomfield has previously written that “technological progress really does offer a path to a better world for all of humanity”, while warning that “technological progress is accelerating and I don’t think many people are prepared for that future”.
For British SMEs, the message is two-sided. The AI boom is opening up opportunity at an incredible pace, but the people best placed to build it, including the founder of the UK’s flagship fintech, continue to choose to build it elsewhere.
