Anthropic opened two new international offices within 48 hours this week — Milan on 27 May and Seoul on 26 May — expanding its non-US presence to six locations alongside London, Tokyo, Bengaluru, and Singapore. The pace of international expansion reflects both commercial ambition and strategic necessity: to serve regulated industries in Europe and Asia, Anthropic needs local presence and eventually local data infrastructure.
Why Milan Matters for UK Businesses
The Milan office is more than a commercial beachhead. European organisations — particularly in financial services and government — have been excluded from Anthropic’s Glasswing cybersecurity programme due to data sovereignty concerns. A European office with local enterprise relationships creates the pathway toward a GDPR-compliant, EU-data-resident infrastructure model that regulated customers require. For UK companies still bound by UK GDPR post-Brexit, the same constraints apply.
Korea’s Unusual AI Adoption Rate
The Seoul opening reflects a demand signal that Anthropic cannot ignore: South Korean usage of Claude runs at 3.5 times the rate that the country’s population size would predict. That ratio suggests an unusually high concentration of Claude-powered enterprise applications and developer tooling in the Korean market.
The Bigger Picture
Six international offices in roughly 18 months represents an unusually rapid internationalisation for a company that, for much of its existence, operated almost exclusively from San Francisco. For the UK, which hosts Anthropic’s European anchor office in London, the expansion confirms Britain’s position as the preferred European base for frontier AI labs — a status that carries both commercial and policy significance.
