UK pitches Anthropic on London expansion and dual listing

Britain is dangling an offer in front of Anthropic: expand your London presence and consider a dual stock listing here, and the UK will offer something the United States now will not — a path that doesn't require you to abandon your red lines on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.

The UK government's courtship of the AI startup is deliberate and high-level. The Financial Times reported via Reuters that the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has circulated proposals for Anthropic ranging from a modest London office expansion to a full dual listing on a UK exchange. Prime Minister Keir Starmer's office has signed off on the effort. The proposals will be presented to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei when he visits in late May.

What the UK is selling is not complicated. Since February, when the Trump administration blacklisted Anthropic and the Pentagon designated it a national-security supply-chain risk, the company's US government business has been in free fall. According to Reuters, the trigger was Anthropic's refusal to let the US military use its Claude chatbot for surveillance or autonomous weapons systems. "No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons," the company said at the time.

The blacklisting was not without complications for Washington. A US judge temporarily blocked the Pentagon's action in March. Anthropic has a separate lawsuit pending over the supply-chain risk designation itself. The company's position has cost it federal contracts and put its commercial relationships with defense contractors at risk — but it has not backed down.

Britain is watching that standoff and seeing an opening. The UK has been building its own AI narrative for the past year, anchored by the AI Opportunities Action Plan released in early 2025 and a progress report issued in January 2026 that assessed delivery against 50 recommendations. Those recommendations span compute infrastructure, homegrown model development, and public-sector data access. The pitch to Anthropic fits inside that larger frame: the UK wants to be a place where AI companies can scale without being forced to choose between commercial viability and their stated principles.

The dual listing proposal is the more structurally interesting element. Anthropic has already taken steps toward a public listing — the company hired Wilson Sonsini in December 2025 to begin structural and regulatory preparation for a possible IPO. A dual listing would give the company a second venue for public trading outside US jurisdiction. For a company whose US federal business is now radioactive, that has concrete value.

London has attempted this before. The UK government pushed hard for Arm Holdings to list in London after its 2016 SoftBank acquisition; Arm chose Nasdaq instead in 2023. What Britain is offering Anthropic is not just a listing venue but a geopolitical shelter — a place to operate outside the reach of a US government that has decided the company's principles are a supply-chain liability.

Anthropic already has a UK entity. Companies House records show Anthropic Limited, incorporated in January 2023, with a registered office at 107 Cheapside in London. The company has been gradually expanding its European footprint — new offices opened in Paris and Munich in early 2026, alongside existing locations in London, Dublin, and Zurich. The UK proposal would accelerate that trajectory significantly.

Whether Amodei accepts any part of the offer is genuinely unclear. Anthropic has not commented publicly on the proposals. The company faces real pressure: its US federal revenue has collapsed, its valuation depends partly on the assumption it can continue scaling commercially, and a dual listing in London would require disclosures that a US listing might not trigger. But accepting British hospitality also means accepting British expectations — and a UK government that wants Anthropic's first major non-American footprint will want something in return.

The question worth watching is what the UK actually wants beyond a listing ceremony. If Britain succeeds in attracting Anthropic's first major non-US footprint, it will be because the US government handed London an opportunity by treating a premier AI company as a national security risk. That is not a tech policy achievement — it is a geopolitical accident. Whether the UK can convert that accident into something durable depends entirely on what it offers next.