Number of Anthropic Employees (November 2026)

Anthropic had about 5,300 employees as of September 30, 2026, according to its IPO prospectus (S-1). This is the first time Anthropic has disclosed its headcount in an SEC filing. 

Anthropic’s headcount grew by about 170% in the 12 months to September 30, 2026. That’s up from a few hundred employees at most in late 2023.

The company is still hiring fast, having nearly 680 open roles listed on its careers site as of October 2026. And it plans to list its shares on Nasdaq, which could happen as soon as November this year.

In this article, we'll break down how many people work at Anthropic, how fast its headcount has grown, where its employees work, and what the numbers mean for investors.

Top Anthropic Employee Statistics

• Anthropic had about 5,300 employees as of September 30, 2026 (Anthropic S-1, October 2026)
• Anthropic’s headcount grew by about 170% in the 12 months to September 30, 2026 (Anthropic S-1, October 2026)
• Anthropic made more than $6.6 million in revenue per employee in the 12 months to September 30, 2026, up from $1.4 million a year earlier (Anthropic S-1, October 2026)
• Anthropic spent $1.71 billion on personnel in Q3 2026, or more than $322,000 per employee for the quarter (Anthropic S-1, November 2026; Business Insider)
• Anthropic listed 683 open roles on October 26, 2026, and sales was the largest group with 121 roles (Anthropic careers site)
• Anthropic has more than 1,300 employees in the San Francisco Bay Area, as of January 2026 (San Francisco Chronicle)
• Anthropic’s careers pages drew 626,643 unique visitors in June 2026, 56% more than OpenAI’s careers pages (Semrush)
• All 7 of Anthropic’s co-founders still work at the company, as of October 2026 (Anthropic)

How Many Employees Does Anthropic Have?

Anthropic had about 5,300 employees as of September 30, 2026, according to its S-1. A majority work in research, engineering and product development.

This figure comes from Anthropic itself, highlighted in its S-1 filing with the SEC on October 26, 2026. It’s the first headcount Anthropic has disclosed in an SEC filing.

The S-1 figure is much higher than earlier reports. A few days before the S-1, The Wall Street Journal reported a headcount of 3,500 employees working in Anthropic.

There are no details in the S-1 explaining this discrepancy.

For investors, the S-1 figure of about 5,300 is now the one to use, because it comes from a filing that Anthropic is legally responsible for.

Does Anthropic Publish Workforce Diversity Data?

Anthropic hasn't published a workforce diversity report, as of October 2026, so there is no public gender or ethnicity breakdown of its employees.

Anthropic isn't alone in this. Several big tech companies have stopped publishing this data. Google, for example, ended its annual diversity reports in 2025, according to HR Brew.

For comparison, see our breakdown of how many people work at Google.

How Has the Number of Anthropic Employees Grown Over Time?

The number of Anthropic employees has grown from 7 co-founders in 2021 to about 5,300 on September 30, 2026.

Anthropic’s headcount grew by about 170% in the 12 months to September 30, 2026, according to its S-1.

Anthropic had about 940 employees at the end of 2024, according to the S-1. Its headcount on September 30, 2026 was more than 5x that figure.

Here's a breakdown of the number of Anthropic employees over time, from 2021 to September 2026:

Date	Anthropic Employees
2021 (founding)	7 co-founders
Late 2023	Fewer than 200 to ~500
End of 2024	~940
End of 2025	~2,300
January 2026	2,500+
September 30, 2026	~5,300

Reports differ on Anthropic's size in late 2023. Fortune reported that Anthropic had fewer than 200 employees in late 2023. The Information put the figure at roughly 300 in December 2023, while a separate Fortune report said around 500.

Anthropic's founders all left OpenAI to start the company in 2021. All 7 co-founders are still at Anthropic, according to the company’s website. They include CEO Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei.

Anthropic has an unusual structure at the top. Dario Amodei has one direct report, his chief of staff, and the rest of the senior leadership reports to Daniela Amodei, according to Fortune.

The pace of hiring is important for investors to pay attention to. Anthropic more than doubled its workforce in the 9 months after the end of 2025, based on Fortune’s year-end figure and the S-1. Bringing in that many people so quickly may be seen by some as an execution risk.

What Is Anthropic's Revenue Per Employee?

Anthropic made more than $6.6 million in revenue per employee in the 12 months to September 30, 2026, according to its S-1. That’s up from $1.4 million a year earlier.

Anthropic’s trailing 12-month revenue grew about 1,200% between September 30, 2025 and September 30, 2026, while its headcount grew about 170%, according to the S-1. Anthropic credits this partly to how much its own staff use Claude.

In the S-1, the company revealed that over 90% of the contributions to Anthropic’s codebase in September 2026 were written by Claude itself.

See our Anthropic revenue statistics for more details.

The revenue per employee is a useful check on efficiency that investors can keep an eye on. The figures may be seen as a sign that Anthropic can grow revenue without growing its team at the same rate.

How Much Does Anthropic Spend on Its Employees?

Anthropic spent $1.71 billion on personnel in Q3 2026, according to its amended S-1. That works out at more than $322,000 per employee for the three months (Q3 personnel costs divided by about 5,300 employees on September 30), as Business Insider calculated.

That figure is a cost to the company, not average pay. It includes $1.07 billion of stock-based pay, which is the value of the shares and share awards Anthropic gives its staff.

Personnel costs fell from $1.86 billion in Q2 2026 to $1.71 billion in Q3. That’s because stock-based pay fell from $1.26 billion to $1.07 billion. Without stock-based pay, personnel costs rose from about $596 million to about $641 million.

Here’s a breakdown of Anthropic’s personnel costs by quarter in 2026:

Quarter	Personnel Costs	Of Which Stock-Based Pay
Q1 2026	$1.30 billion	$924 million
Q2 2026	$1.86 billion	$1.26 billion
Q3 2026	$1.71 billion	$1.07 billion

Staff are a much smaller cost than computing power. Anthropic spent $9.9 billion on compute and infrastructure in Q3 2026, nearly 6x its personnel costs.

Stock-based pay will jump when Anthropic lists. If its IPO had been completed on September 30, 2026, Anthropic would have recorded $8.2 billion of stock-based pay at once for restricted stock units (RSUs) granted to employees and other service providers, according to the S-1. A further $24.1 billion would be recorded over about two years.

For investors, that one-off charge will show up in Anthropic’s first results as a public company, so its first reported loss may look much bigger than its day-to-day costs.

How Many People Is Anthropic Hiring?

Anthropic listed 683 open roles on its careers site on October 26, 2026. That’s up from 646 on October 12, 2026, and equal to about 13% of its headcount on September 30, 2026.

Sales is Anthropic’s biggest hiring area, with 121 open roles, or about 18% of the total.

Here's a breakdown of Anthropic's open roles by department, as of October 26, 2026:

Department	Open Roles
Sales	121
AI Research & Engineering	67
Applied AI	64
Finance	54
Engineering & Design (Product)	51
Security	50
Software Engineering (Infrastructure)	50
Safeguards (Trust & Safety)	44
Technical Program Management	28
Compute	27

Most open roles are in the US. San Francisco is listed on 489 roles, New York on 364 and Seattle on 190. Many roles list more than one city.

Anthropic is also building bigger teams outside the US. It has more than 200 people in London and new office space for 800.

Plus, the company is planning to hire about 200 people in Dublin.

The pace of hiring at the top has picked up too. Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder, joined Anthropic's pre-training team in May 2026, according to TechCrunch.

In June 2026, Nobel laureate John Jumper said he was leaving Google DeepMind for Anthropic.

The mix of open roles shows where Anthropic is putting its money. This is an important indicator for investors.

Sales has the most open roles, which points to a focus on selling to more customers.

Where Do Anthropic Employees Work?

Most Anthropic employees work in the US. Anthropic had more than 1,300 employees in the San Francisco Bay Area in January 2026, according to Daniela Amodei, who gave the Bay Area figure to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Anthropic's headcount in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) tripled in the year to November 2025.

Here's a breakdown of Anthropic's international offices, and when each one opened:

Office	Region	Opened
London	Europe	2023
Dublin	Europe	By April 2025
Zurich	Europe	Before November 2025
Tokyo	Asia-Pacific	October 2025
Paris	Europe	Announced November 2025
Munich	Europe	Announced November 2025
Bengaluru	Asia-Pacific	February 2026
Sydney	Asia-Pacific	April 2026
Milan	Europe	May 2026
Seoul	Asia-Pacific	June 2026

Anthropic opened or announced eight offices outside the US between October 2025 and October 2026. Investors should note that new offices outside the US widen the markets where Anthropic can sell directly.

How Does Anthropic's Headcount Compare With OpenAI?

Anthropic now has more employees than OpenAI had earlier this year. Anthropic had about 5,300 employees on September 30, 2026, while OpenAI had about 4,500 in March 2026.

But OpenAI planned to grow to around 8,000 employees by the end of 2026. No newer OpenAI headcount has been reported.

Other AI labs are harder to compare. Google DeepMind and Mistral AI don't publish official headcounts. And xAI is now part of SpaceX, which reported more than 22,000 full-time employees as of March 31, 2026, in its IPO filing. That figure covers the whole company, not only its AI work.

Anthropic has also been good at retaining its people.

80% of employees Anthropic hired at least 2 years earlier were still at the company at the end of their second year, according to SignalFire. That compared with 67% at OpenAI.

SignalFire's figures come from its May 2025 report, based on LinkedIn profile data.

The same report also found that engineers were 8 times more likely to leave OpenAI for Anthropic than the reverse. Similarly, the ratio from Google DeepMind was nearly 11 to 1 in Anthropic's favor.

The strong retention is part of what makes Anthropic a strong opportunity for investors. To compare the two companies on revenue, see our OpenAI revenue statistics.

Can Anthropic Employees Sell Their Shares?

Yes. Anthropic has let employees and other shareholders sell some of their shares before its IPO, through share sales called tender offers.

In April 2026, a group of investors bought 179.9 million Anthropic shares in a tender offer for $4.66 billion, at $25.91 per share. The sellers included current and former employees. The price was about 4.6x the $5.61 per share paid in a June 2025 tender offer.

The S-1 also shows that Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei sold shares in both tender offers.

Once Anthropic lists, employees can sell only part of their shares at first, with more released in stages. Some current and former employees are locked up for up to 180 days, or until shortly after Anthropic reports its Q1 2027 results, whichever comes first. The 7 co-founders are locked up for up to a year.

All of Anthropic's co-founders have pledged to give away 80% of their wealth, Dario Amodei wrote in a January 2026 essay.

For investors, the lock-up dates matter. When they end, more employee shares could reach the market.

How Many People Want to Work at Anthropic?

Anthropic's careers pages drew 626,643 unique visitors in June 2026, according to Semrush. That's 56% more than OpenAI's careers pages, which drew 400,429.

The US made up 44.26% of visits, compared with 53.72% for OpenAI's careers pages.

The UK was the second-biggest source of visits to Anthropic's careers pages, at 14.12%. India was third, at 9.20%.

Here's a breakdown of visits to Anthropic's careers pages by country in June 2026:

Country	Proportion of Traffic
United States	44.26%
United Kingdom	14.12%
India	9.20%
Germany	4.99%
Singapore	3.16%

Figures above are for June 2026.

For the latest monthly figures, see Exploding Topics' anthropic.com website traffic analytics.

For investors, strong interest from jobseekers helps Anthropic hire quickly in a tight market for AI talent. You can check the same signal for any company with Semrush Traffic Analytics.

What Does Search Data Say About Anthropic and AI Jobs?

Exploding Topics data shows that searches for "Anthropic" grew 1,533% between October 2024 and September 2026. Searches for "OpenAI" grew 200% over the same period.

Searches for AI skills grew too. Exploding Topics data shows that searches for "AI engineering" grew 740% between October 2024 and September 2026, while searches for "prompt engineering" grew 300%.

Here's a breakdown of searches for Anthropic, OpenAI and AI talent terms, October 2024 to September 2026:

Search Term	October 2024	Peak	September 2026	2-Year Change
Anthropic	167,755	5,591,836 (June 2026)	2,740,000	+1,533%
OpenAI	1,666,666	16,666,666 (June 2026)	5,000,000	+200%
AI engineering	13,095	261,904 (June 2026)	110,000	+740%
Prompt engineering	33,750	259,615 (June 2026)	135,000	+300%

For investors, rising searches for AI engineering skills point to more competition for the same talent. That could push up hiring costs for every AI lab, including Anthropic.

What's Next for Anthropic's Workforce?

Anthropic’s IPO is the next big step for its workforce. Anthropic’s shares could start trading the week before Thanksgiving, according to the Wall Street Journal, as reported by Seeking Alpha. Many employees will hold publicly traded shares for the first time.

Anthropic’s headcount is likely to keep rising, with 683 roles open and new offices filling up in London, Dublin and Asia-Pacific. As a public company, Anthropic will report its headcount in its annual filings.

How We Compiled These Statistics

We used Anthropic’s S-1 filing with the SEC, including the amended S-1 filed on November 2, 2026, the company's own announcements and careers site, and research reports and news outlets like Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, TechCrunch, Financial Times, and others (see hyperlinks). Where sources disagree, we say so and give each figure with its date. We don’t use third-party headcount estimates, because their providers don’t publish their methods. Search data comes from Exploding Topics, and website traffic data comes from Semrush. Figures are as of November 4, 2026.

For more company and AI statistics, take a look at:

• Anthropic Revenue and Valuation Statistics
• OpenAI Revenue and Valuation Statistics
• Number of Google Employees
• Number of Nvidia Employees
• The Hidden AI Workforce: 29% of Employees Pay for Their Own AI Tools

Want to see how fast a company like Anthropic is growing before its next announcement? Semrush Traffic & Market toolkit shows any company's website traffic, audience and top pages, so you can track hiring interest and market share yourself. Try Semrush free. And to spot the next fast-growing AI companies early, try Exploding Topics Pro.