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There is an open question about artificial intelligence’s long-term impact on office demand: Will it create jobs and thus boost office space takeup, or will it steal them from white-collar workers and weigh down on leasing?
For the here and now in London, it’s having a positive effect as AI firms scale up their presence in the city.
Anthropic has agreed to lease 158K SF at British Land and Royal London Asset Management’s One Triton Square office development in Euston, CoStar News reported. The deal means the 300K SF building is almost fully leased.
The space can accommodate about 800 people, whereas Anthropic’s building at 107 Cheapside accommodates about 200 people, according to CoStar. This indicates the maker of the Claude large language model is planning a significant expansion.
The deal comes on the back of OpenAI leasing 89K SF at Nan Fung’s Regent’s Quarter scheme at nearby King’s Cross. Its building, which is set to open in 2027, will be able to house 550 staff, up from its current London headcount of 200.
In March, AI and data company Databricks leased the entirety of Derwent London’s 136K SF Network W1 building, just off Tottenham Court Road. The company took a 15-year lease with a break at 10 years, paying £14M in annual rent.
At BL and RLAM’s One Triton Square, the lease to Anthropic brings the building full circle, in a way. Meta took a lease on the building in 2021 but pulled back from its proposed expansion in 2023 and never actually occupied the space.
Meta paid British Land £149M to break its lease. BL then refurbished and pivoted the building toward life sciences, but as that sector has cooled, it has come back to the tech sector to fill the space.
BL sold a 50% stake in the project to RLAM in a deal that valued it at £385M.
Savills and Cushman & Wakefield advised BL and RLAM. JLL and Kontor advised Anthropic.
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