- Anthropic is opening a Milan office this month, its sixth European base in under a year, as EMEA becomes the company’s fastest-growing region with run-rate revenue up more than 9x year-on-year.
- The move is not simply commercial: CEO Dario Amodei travelled to Rome for meetings with Italian officials the same week co-founder Christopher Olah appeared alongside Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican’s first major AI ethics encyclical.
- Italy gives Anthropic access to a Southern European industrial economy, financial services, manufacturing, consumer goods, that OpenAI has not yet formally entered with a dedicated office.
Six months ago, Italy was not on Anthropic‘s named-office list. This week it is. The Claude maker will open a Milan office this month, adding Italy to a European footprint that already spans London, Dublin, Zurich, Paris, and Munich. The pace of expansion is itself the story and the numbers driving it make the logic clear.
EMEA run-rate revenue has grown more than 9x in the past year, and the number of large EMEA business accounts has grown more than 10x. No other geography in Anthropic’s go-to-market is moving at this speed. The company is planning to triple its international workforce to meet rising demand for its Claude AI models outside the United States —its London office alone employs around 200 staff, with plans to expand to 800. Anthropic is offering up to £630,000 per year for London engineers, a salary level already forcing European startups to reconsider their own compensation structures.
“After France and Germany, Italy is a natural next step,” said Chris Ciauri, Anthropic’s managing director of international, in an interview published by Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera.
The Vatican layer
Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah appeared alongside Pope Leo XIV on May 25 at the presentation of the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, the Vatican’s first major teaching document on AI ethics, speaking in the Synod Hall before an audience of cardinals, theologians, and the diplomatic corps. CEO Dario Amodei then travelled to Rome for meetings with senior Italian institutional figures. The commercial office launch, the papal encyclical, and the CEO’s Rome trip all fell within a single week, a calculated positioning move by a company that has long treated AI governance as a commercial advantage, not just a compliance burden.
That strategy has a specific context. The Milan push follows scrutiny Anthropic faced in the US, including being labelled a “supply chain risk” by the Pentagon, the first time such a designation had been applied to an American firm. In Rome, Anthropic is doing something it cannot currently do in Washington: placing itself at the centre of the global conversation about how AI should be governed, and doing so through one of the world’s most symbolically powerful institutions.
What Milan actually means commercially
Anthropic’s pitch to Italian enterprises rests on a specific tension that has defined the European AI market since the EU AI Act began moving toward enforcement: the perception among risk-conscious European companies that US-frontier AI models arrive with governance and compliance frameworks calibrated for American legal standards, not EU regulatory requirements. Italy’s financial services, manufacturing, and consumer goods sectors, precisely the industries Anthropic is targeting, are among Europe’s most compliance-sensitive.
Anthropic already works with European enterprises, including L’Oréal, BMW, SAP, and N26, and has been embedding Claude in enterprise operations across the continent through a $1.5B joint venture with Goldman Sachs and Blackstone. Italy extends that footprint into Southern Europe, a market that Paris and Munich do not naturally serve from a language, regulatory, or relationship standpoint.
The competitive race in Italy, as across Europe, pits Anthropic directly against OpenAI — a firm racing to cement its own European presence while eyeing a $500B AI infrastructure rollout across the continent. According to Menlo Ventures’ end-of-2025 State of Generative AI report, Anthropic now holds approximately 40% of the enterprise LLM market share, up from 32% in mid-2025 and 12% in 2023, while OpenAI has fallen from 50% to 27% over the same period. OpenAI does not have a dedicated Italian office.
The broader trajectory
Anthropic has crossed a $30 billion annualised revenue run rate as of April 2026. The company closed a $30B Series G at a $380 billion valuation in February 2026, and is now reportedly in talks for a new raise that could push it toward $1 trillion. CEO Dario Amodei has publicly stated that Q1 2026 saw 80x annualised revenue growth, outstripping the company’s own forecasts by a factor of eight, though these figures are CEO-attributed and have not been independently verified through audited financials. Enterprise customers spending $1 million or more annually reportedly doubled in under two months to surpass 1,000. Europe is a material contributor to that number.
The Milan office has a modest physical footprint. But it sits inside a pattern, six European cities in under a year, a tripling of international headcount, a $380 billion confirmed valuation, and a co-founder at the Vatican, that describes a company moving from American AI lab to global infrastructure provider faster than almost anyone anticipated.
Europe’s most valuable homegrown AI company, Mistral, has been expanding aggressively in parallel, raising €1.7B and breaking ground on a dedicated AI data centre south of Paris, but has no Italian office of its own. The question Europe’s AI ecosystem now faces is whether the arrival of well-resourced, safety-branded US incumbents accelerates the continent’s adoption or crowds out the European alternatives trying to build their own.
