Tom Blomfield joins Anthropic as compute lead

British fintech founder Tom Blomfield, co‑founder of Monzo and GoCardless, announced he is taking a leave of absence from Y Combinator to join AI start‑up Anthropic as a member of technical staff on its compute team, working alongside Anthropic co‑founder Tom Brown. Blomfield said the availability of compute is a critical challenge as AI systems become more powerful.

Anthropic, one of the most valuable AI companies, is in a fierce talent war with rivals such as OpenAI, Meta and Google. It has pledged to deploy up to a million Google TPUs, more than a gigawatt of compute capacity this year, and signed additional deals for next‑generation chips and Nvidia GPUs. The firm offers base salaries for senior technical staff exceeding $1 million and is preparing a potential IPO in the fall of 2026. Recent high‑profile hires include OpenAI co‑founder Andrej Karpathy and Nobel laureate John Jumper.

Blomfield’s move highlights the crossover of fintech leadership into AI infrastructure, underscoring Anthropic’s push to secure top talent and scale its compute resources ahead of a public listing.