Anthropic’s Tom Blomfield says his new coworkers are a ‘hyper-earnest group of meganerds’ with a ‘lack of ego’

Tom Blomfield has shared a candid assessment of his new Anthropic colleagues: “often weird” but with a “surprising lack of ego or politics.”

Blomfield, one of the biggest names in UK tech, took a leave of absence from Y Combinator to join Anthropic’s compute team in July.

He wrote in a Tuesday X post that although Anthropic is “not perfect by any means,” it has the “most powerful sense of mission of any company I’ve ever encountered.”

He included Monzo, the British fintech company he cofounded, in that assessment, writing that he “thought it was an outlier.”

“Overall impression of @anthropicAI after 2 months; hyper-earnest group of meganerds who are very very focussed on ensuring this AI thing goes well for humans,” Blomfield wrote in the X post.

Anthropic would likely agree with at least half of that statement: the startup has positioned itself as a company prioritizing AI safety.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In July, Anthropic’s head of growth, Amol Avasare, gave another insight into the company’s culture, sharing on a podcast that employees can openly challenge the CEO — even on Slack.

The company behind the AI model Claude has also become one of the hottest career destinations in Silicon Valley — alongside rival OpenAI — as tech talent looks to participate in the AI boom and potentially cash in on one of the biggest ever tech IPOs.

Blomfield became one of Anthropic’s big-name summer hires as the AI talent wars have continued to heat up. Anthropic poached several researchers from Google DeepMind, including John Jumper, whose work on AlphaFold won him and CEO Demis Hassabis a Nobel prize.

More recently, Anthropic hired Amir Salek from Google to join its compute team.

While Blomfield’s work focuses on compute, his title at Anthropic is a “member of technical staff,” the catch-all job title Anthropic uses for senior employees.

“The work is totally new to me,” he wrote in his Tuesday X post. “I’m spending every day talking about data center leases, gas turbines, and project finance. It’s amazing to be a beginner again.”