Tom Blomfield, general partner at Y Combinator, has taken a leave of absence from the company to join Anthropic, adding to the competition for top AI talent.
"Powerful AI has the potential to improve the life of every human on earth and, as we enter the early stages of recursive self-improvement, availability of compute becomes one of the most important issues to solve. I’m excited to get started," he wrote in a post on X.
Blomfield will be working with Tom Brown, co-founder and chief compute officer at Anthropic, as a member of its technical staff, a term used to describe senior-level employees at the company.
Before working at Y Combinator, Blomfield was the CEO of British fintech company Monzo Bank, where he worked for six years. He departed the digital bank in 2021 after a short role as president, later joining Y Combinator first in a visiting partner role, before moving to general partner in April 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Anthropic’s Hiring Spree
Anthropic has been on a hiring spree lately, recruiting top talent in a push to expand its workforce.
Last week, Anthropic hired former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to its long-term benefit trust (LTBT), an AI oversight body tasked with ensuring the company remains accountable to its broader public interest goals.
In his role, Bernanke will provide guidance on the potential risks and societal impacts of AI, as well as how AI is changing the economy. He will also lead insight into Anthropic’s economic research, in addition to other areas of the artificial intelligence company’s work, Anthropic reported.
Earlier this year, the artificial intelligence company hired Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla.
The company also brought on cybersecurity veteran Chris Rohlf to its Frontier Red team, which is tasked with probing advanced models for high-severity risks. Rohlf previously worked with Yahoo’s security unit known as “The Paranoids” and later spent six years at Meta.
Anthropic also poached researcher John Jumper from Google DeepMind, Reuters reported last month. Jumper was the co-creator of AlphaFold and a 2024 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry.
It was reported last month that Anthropic and rival OpenAI have been hiring employees from Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) at a rapid clip, with LinkedIn profiles pointing to close to 100 moves since the start of 2026.
Anthropic has hired 45 Salesforce employees over the last six months, and OpenAI has added 40 more to its teams, primarily in sales and marketing and go-to-market roles.
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