Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company, plans to announce on Tuesday that it will lease a 16-story office building in Lower Manhattan as the company moves to double its work force in New York City to 1,000 people this year.
The move into a renovated building at 330 Hudson Street in the Hudson Square neighborhood is part of a major expansion of A.I. companies in New York City.
Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude, said that its New York office was already its largest outside its San Francisco headquarters and that the new space had room for more than 1,700 desks. The move is expected to start this summer.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration praised the expansion, as did Gov. Kathy Hochul, who said in a statement that it would “cement New York City as a world-class technology hub.”
Artificial intelligence companies have been adding office space in New York City and going on a hiring spree, even as some elected officials have raised concerns about the technology and how it could displace white-collar workers.
Thomas P. DiNapoli, the state comptroller, said recently that he was worried about the disruption A.I. could bring, warning that it could “damage the quality and productivity of a company’s work force and, more broadly, add to the large-scale instability of the economy.”
OpenAI, whose ChatGPT chatbot started the A.I. boom in 2022, announced its move into the Puck Building, less than a mile from Anthropic’s new office, in 2024. Harvey, an A.I. start-up for the legal industry, expanded its office at One Madison Avenue in Midtown Manhattan earlier this year.
Anthropic’s expansion is a further sign of the evolution of artificial intelligence as the technology matures and moves into the economic mainstream. Big A.I. companies are increasingly extending their focus beyond building new software models to pushing other industries to adopt the technology. And New York is home to some of the nation’s largest technology customers in finance, health care, consulting, law, media and culture.
“New York is a great place for an A.I. company to work and do business,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, a division of the Brookings Institution. Mr. Muro was a co-author of a Brookings report last year that found New York to be a leader among U.S. metro areas in “A.I. readiness,” a broad measurement of the capacity to both produce A.I. and adopt it.
Chris Lehane, the chief global affairs officer for OpenAI, said in a statement that the company had 90,000 square feet of office space in New York City and would keep expanding. He said the city was a “global hub for A.I.” because of its “A.I. talent density, inherent entrepreneurship and the policy leadership from its elected officials.”
Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has had a frosty relationship with business leaders over his calls to tax the rich, and has moved to win them over. He has also faced criticism for not yet releasing a detailed plan to address the city’s slowing job growth.
Jeanny Pak, the interim president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation under Mr. Mamdani, said that Anthropic’s move would “create hundreds of jobs for New Yorkers, strengthening equitable pathways to economic opportunities and reinforcing that companies continue to choose New York City.”
New York now has far more tech talent than in the past. Two decades ago, when a computer scientist at Google wanted to create an engineering team in New York, the Silicon Valley company’s leaders were skeptical. They told him he could go ahead, but only if could find 15 “Google-worthy” software developers in the city. Today Google employs thousands of engineers in New York.
A.I. companies are hiring at a time when young people in particular are having a hard time getting jobs. Anthropic’s website has dozens of openings listed in New York. Many of them are in engineering and sales and on the company’s legal and marketing teams.
Julie Samuels, president of Tech:NYC, a nonprofit industry group, acknowledged that the most advanced A.I. software was still designed primarily in the Bay Area. “But when it comes to how to use the technology in practice, what works and what doesn’t in business, they come here,” she said. “That’s where we are now.”
Still, many New Yorkers have concerns about A.I., particularly in the progressive circles Mr. Mamdani comes from. Some parents in the city are fighting the use of the technology in public schools. And the debate permeated a congressional primary campaign in Manhattan: Super PACs aligned with A.I. companies spent heavily both for and against one of the Democratic candidates, Alex Bores, who has sought to regulate the industry. (Mr. Bores lost the election last month to Micah Lasher, a fellow state assemblyman.)
State lawmakers in New York recently approved a one-year moratorium on new large-scale data centers that power A.I., citing concerns about energy consumption and environmental effects. But Ms. Hochul, a moderate Democrat who is friendly with business leaders, has signaled that she might veto the legislation.
Anthropic, which filed last month for an initial public offering, is planning to build a data center in upstate New York with a company called Fluidstack as part of a $50 billion investment in American data centers.
A.I. companies have hired veterans of New York City government to help them navigate the city’s thorny political landscape. Maxwell Young, a former adviser to Mayor Eric Adams, joined Anthropic in November as the head of policy communications. Peter Ragone, a top adviser to former Mayor Bill de Blasio and to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, is working for OpenAI.
Mark Levine, the city comptroller, released a report in May warning about the impact A.I. could have on jobs in New York City. He called on Mr. Mamdani to outline a vision for making sure that the city benefits from the industry’s growth.
“We should be the capital of applied A.I., and a more concerted strategy to make that happen is absolutely needed,” Mr. Levine said in an interview.
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