The UK government is preparing proposals to present to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei during a planned visit to London in late May, including expanded office space and a potential dual listing on the London Stock Exchange. The outreach, coordinated by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, comes weeks after a federal court blocked the Pentagon's attempt to brand Anthropic a national security risk.

That dispute gave the UK an opening. In late February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic and its Claude models a "supply chain risk," the first time that designation, typically reserved for foreign adversaries, was applied to an American company. The move followed the collapse of a $200 million defense contract: Anthropic had refused to allow Claude to power autonomous lethal weapons systems or large-scale domestic surveillance. President Trump called the company "radical left, woke." On March 26, US District Judge Rita Lin issued a preliminary injunction blocking the designation, calling it "Orwellian" and finding strong evidence of pretextual retaliation. The Trump administration filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit on April 2.

For the UK, the dispute created a recruiting argument it could not have made six months ago. London Mayor Sadiq Khan has written personally to Amodei. Business Secretary Peter Kyle framed the pitch in terms of talent and investment. One official described the dual listing idea as "the dream," an acknowledgment that it is unlikely given Anthropic's expected US IPO, but a signal of how seriously the government is treating the courtship.

The pitch also reveals how dependent the UK has become on attracting foreign AI companies in the absence of a domestic one. The UK has no equivalent of France's Mistral AI, Europe's only homegrown frontier lab, valued at around €11.7 billion. Strip Google DeepMind, an American-owned subsidiary headquartered in London, out of the UK's research output, and Britain's share of top AI papers falls from 7.2 percent to 1.9 percent.

The structural gaps extend to compute. The UK holds 1.4 percent of global AI compute capacity, ranking 10th globally. Labour cancelled an £800 million exascale supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh within months of taking office in 2024. The government's subsequent AI Opportunities Action Plan committed to a 20-fold increase in public compute by 2030, but most initiatives remain at the planning or pilot stage.

The political history adds an ironic layer. Anthropic's most prominent UK presence is Rishi Sunak, hired as a paid senior adviser in October 2025. As prime minister, Sunak hosted the 2023 Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit, which 28 nations attended and established the AI Safety Institute as the centrepiece of the UK's claim to global AI governance leadership. That claim has since eroded: the AI Safety Institute was rebranded the AI Security Institute under Labour, the UK declined to sign the Paris AI summit declaration in February alongside the United States, and the Edinburgh supercomputer was among the first commitments Labour cut.

Anthropic currently employs roughly 200 people in London, including around 60 researchers, giving the government something real to build on. Whether expanded office space and a longshot stock listing is enough to anchor a company navigating a $380 billion valuation, an imminent IPO, and an ongoing legal fight with its own government is another question.

Sources: CityAM, Engadget, AI News

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By the Control Plane Editorial Team