Theo Hourmouzis has been appointed general manager for Australia and New Zealand by Anthropic, as the artificial intelligence firm prepares to open its first Australian office in Sydney.
The company, which developed the Claude chatbot and is valued at more than $500 billion, is expanding into the local market amid strong uptake, with Australians ranking seventh globally for Claude usage per capita.
Hourmouzis brings nearly three decades of experience in the tech sector and joins Anthropic from cloud data platform Snowflake.
“Organisations across Australia and New Zealand are thinking carefully about how to adopt AI, and they want partners who take safety and rigour as seriously as they take the opportunity,” he said.
“That’s what drew me to Anthropic. I’ve spent my career working with businesses and governments across this region, and the organisations that do best with AI will be the ones that pair ambition with discipline.”
Anthropic has already secured Australian clients including Canva and the YMCA in South Australia.
The expansion follows a recent visit by CEO Dario Amodei, who met with political and business leaders and signed a non-binding agreement with the federal government aligned with the National AI Plan.
However, the company is also facing scrutiny over its powerful “Mythos” AI model, which it says has unprecedented cyber capabilities and has not been released publicly due to safety concerns.
Some experts, including former national cybersecurity adviser Alastair MacGibbon, have warned restrictions on the technology may not hold.
“If you’re the government, you need to be demanding from the frontier labs access to those tools … not the select group of winners that they picked in their boardroom sitting in the United States,” he said.
Source: Daily Telegraph.
