Anthropic nabs Humanloop team as competition for enterprise AI talent heats up

Anthropic has acquired the co-founders and most of the team behind Humanloop – a platform for prompt management, LLM evaluation, and observability – in a push to strengthen its enterprise strategy.

The terms of the deal were not shared, but it appears to follow the acqui-hire playbook we’re increasingly seeing in the tech industry amid the war for AI talent. Humanloop’s three co-founders – CEO Raza Habib, CTO Peter Hayes, and CPO Jordan Burgess – have all joined Anthropic, alongside around a dozen engineers and researchers. 

Anthropic is growing fast in the enterprise space as it leads in agentic and coding capabilities. While an Anthropic spokesperson confirmed that the AI firm did not acquire Humanloop’s assets or its intellectual property, that’s a moot point in an industry where IP lives in the brain. And what Humanloop’s team is bringing to Anthropic is experience developing the tools that help enterprises run safe, reliable AI at scale.  

Or as Brad Abrams, API product lead at Anthropic, put it: “Their proven experience in AI tooling and evaluation will be invaluable as we continue to advance our work in AI safety and building useful AI systems.” 

In a market where model quality alone isn’t enough to stay competitive, bolstering its tooling ecosystem could position Anthropic to cement its lead over OpenAI and Google DeepMind in both performance and enterprise readiness. 

Humanloop was founded in 2020 as a University College London spinout. The startup then went on to participate in Y Combinator and the Fuse Incubator before raising $7.91 million in seed funding across two rounds led by YC and Index Ventures, per PitchBook. Humanloop gained a reputation for helping enterprise customers – including Duolingo, Gusto, and Vanta – develop, evaluate, and fine-tune robust AI applications.

Last month, Humanloop told customers that it would be shutting down in preparation for an acquisition.

The timing of this acqui-hire comes as Anthropic offers features like longer context windows to enterprise clients, improving what its models are capable of and where they can be applied.

Earlier this week, Anthropic reached a deal with the U.S. government’s central purchasing arm to sell its AI services to government agencies across executive, judiciary, and legislative branches for just $1 per agency for the first year – a clear move to undercut OpenAI’s similarly priced offering. Both government and enterprise buyers demand the type of evaluation, monitoring, and compliance features that Humanloop specialized in. 

The acquisition is also on brand for Anthropic as it bills itself as a “safety-first” AI company. Humanloop’s evaluation workflows align with that mission by providing constant performance measurement, safety guardrails, and bias mitigation.

“From our earliest days, we’ve been focused on creating tools that help developers build AI applications safely and effectively,” said Raza Habib, former CEO of Humanloop, in a statement. “Anthropic’s commitment to AI safety research and responsible AI development perfectly aligns with our vision.”