Anthropic lands in London as AI-powered coding—and the anxieties around it—go mainstream

Welcome to Eye on AI. Beatrice Nolan here, filling in for AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In today’s issue: Anthropic’s Claude comes to London…Open AI’s imminent IPO…Google Deep Mind’s union battle…and worldwide AI spending on track to hit $2.59 trillion this year. Most of Anthropic’s leadership team has hopped across the pond this week. The AI lab is hosting a series of events around the U.K., kicking off with Code with Claude London on Tuesday. The company used the event to roll out new features for its Claude Agents, including sandboxes that let companies run agents on their own infrastructure, and ‘MCP tunnels’ that let those agents reach internal systems without touching the public internet. In short, new ways for companies to have more control and more security—a possible attempt to calm C-suite nerves about ungoverned AI. The London event, Anthropic’s first dedicated developer gathering in Europe, underscores how central the city has become to the AI ecosystem, with the city gaining even more prominence in recent months. Heavyweights including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Jeff Bezos’s AI lab, Project Prometheus, have all announced plans to build out a substantial presence in the city. Anthropic’s Claude event was heavily oversubscribed, with a mix of enterprise customers, startup workers, and Claude enthusiasts pouring into the riverside venue despite the rain. Engineers at startups told me they were using Claude Code and similar tools on a daily basis. Are they concerned about the existential risk this may pose to their jobs? Sure. But better the devil you know, they said. There were a few gripes about Claude’s recent performance issues and Anthropic’s lackluster response, but overall people were pretty happy with the product. (To be expected, perhaps at an Anthropic event.) Enterprise customers were more complicated. While some were embracing the technology headfirst, others say the rollout has been slower. There’s still