Tom Blomfield, founder of online bank Monzo, has joined AI company Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot. Blomfield will take a leave of absence from his current role at start-up investor Y Combinator to work on Anthropic’s compute team with co-founder Tom Brown, responsible for securing hardware and infrastructure for its AI systems. Blomfield started Monzo in 2015 and served as its chief executive until 2020, growing the company to more than 15 million customers and £25bn in deposits. After leaving Monzo in 2021, he joined Y Combinator, which was an investor in both Monzo and GoCardless. He quit London for San Francisco after voicing criticism of Britain’s approach to tech companies. Anthropic recently overtook OpenAI as the world’s most valuable AI company and is gearing up for a $1tn stock market listing, having filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month to begin the process of an initial public offering.