Tom Blomfield, the co-founder of British digital bank Monzo, is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic’s compute team. 

Anthropic is in the middle of an intense industry contest for AI talent. The company is paying some technical staff base salaries above $1 million and heading toward a possible IPO this fall.

Who is Anthropic’s newest hire? 

Tom Blomfield, the co-founder of the British digital bank, Monzo,  announced in a post on X that he is taking a leave of absence from the startup accelerator Y Combinator, where he has been a general partner since 2023. He will work alongside Anthropic’s Tom Brown. Blomfield’s title will be member of technical staff, which is the designation Anthropic applies to its senior hires. 

Blomfield explained that the availability of compute is an important issue to solve because it is the raw processing power that trains and runs AI systems. 

Blomfield is one of the better-known figures in UK technology. He co-founded Monzo in 2015 and ran it as chief executive until 2020, before leaving the company entirely in early 2021 after a brief spell as president. He said at the time that the role stopped appealing to him once Monzo had outgrown its startup phase. 

He turned to investing after that, joining Y Combinator in 2021 as a visiting partner before stepping up to general partner. 

This move is the latest in a hiring streak for Anthropic. Earlier in 2026, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joined the company to lead its pre-training work. Anthropic has also hired top researchers from Google DeepMind, including John Jumper, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on AlphaFold. 

How much is Anthropic paying for its AI talent?

Two Anthropic employees with the “Member of Technical Staff” title have base salaries of $1.12 million and $1.38 million. Notably, these figures only show base pay. They do not include bonuses or stock options, which often make up a much larger part of total pay at fast-growing tech companies. 

The starting base salary for a Member of Technical Staff is $133,952. The same filings also show that a manager in a technical role can earn up to $850,000, and a reinforcement learning researcher can earn up to $500,000.

Anthropic is competing with tech giants like Meta and Google, and other AI labs like OpenAI for AI talent, leading to competitive salary offers and the current inflation. 

Anthropic’s valuation stood at $965 billion as of May 2026, and the company could pursue an initial public offering as soon as this fall, the report said. 

Axios noted that Anthropic and OpenAI both hold a recruiting edge because their pending IPOs offer upside that already-public rivals cannot match. 

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