Anthropic tells most Bay Area staff to work from the office regularly

Anthropic, one of the most heavily funded AI companies in the world, has instructed its San Francisco-based employees to work from home. For a company that spent the last few years quietly becoming one of the city’s largest commercial tenants, that’s a notable pivot. The directive applies to staff based in San Francisco, where Anthropic has built an enormous physical footprint centered in the SoMa district, a neighborhood that has effectively become the gravitational center of the US AI industry. From mega-leases to work-from-home By mid-2026, the company’s office footprint in the city reached nearly 1 million square feet. Anthropic was founded in January 2021 by Dario and Daniela Amodei, along with a group of researchers who had previously worked at OpenAI. One of the most significant pieces of that real estate puzzle came in 2023, when Anthropic signed a lease for an entire building at 500 Howard Street, taking over space previously held by Slack. Additional leases in the surrounding SoMa area followed, building out a campus-style presence in a neighborhood where AI companies now cluster. The hybrid tension that never really went away Most Bay Area-based employees were expected t...