Anthropic appoints leading AI researcher Neil Houlsby to lead their Zurich Office

Zurich is Anthropic’s third European office (after London in 2023 and Dublin in 2024), and the 8th office globally. The office will continue Anthropic’s world-leading research at the AI frontier, working across the development and infrastructure for state-of-the-art large language models and focusing on multimodal capabilities. Anthropic is actively recruiting for a number of exciting research positions in Zürich. 

Neil brings over a decade of experience in cutting-edge AI research, spanning work on neural architectures, computer vision, and language models. Prior to joining Anthropic as Head of Zürich, Neil was a Senior Staff Research Scientist and Manager at Google DeepMind. He has published over 60 academic papers, including Vision Transformers, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and the PaLI multimodal models. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he studied machine learning under the supervision of Professor Zoubin Ghahramani and Professor Máté Lengyel.

“We’re already building a strong team in Zürich, and we’re looking for great researchers and engineers to join us - people with a passion for developing AI for the global good and working at the cutting-edge frontier of AI and multimodal LLMs like Claude.” continued Houlsby. Anthropic’s flagship frontier model AI assistant, Claude, launched in Europe in May 2024 and is used by many of the continent’s leading companies and institutions including the European Parliament, France’s SNCF, Denmark’s Novo Nordisk, Germany’s TUI Group, and Genomics England in the UK. 

Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s Chief Science Officer: "As a global center of excellence for AI research, Zürich is a natural home for Anthropic to grow its European presence. Neil brings the skills of a world-class researcher and a great manager, and we're thrilled to have him lead the team. Neil will be building out a team of researchers focused on core technical challenges in safe, and responsible ML and AI, with several roles currently open for ambitious technical talent."