British Land and Royal London Asset Management have signed pioneering AI group Anthropic for 158,000 square feet at One Triton Square, Regent’s Place in London, CoStar News can reveal, a major vindication for the duo at a building Meta had previously paid not to occupy.
Anthropic confirmed to Bloomberg in an interview yesterday (16 April) it had chosen a building in Euston for around 800 people as it seeks to expand its research and commercial footprint in Europe.
The group has around 200 people based at 107 Cheapside in London and the space it has leased is substantially more than required for 800 so it is clearly planning rapid expansion.
It is moving close to peers in the AI space at the King's Cross Knowledge Quarter, including OpenAI, which last week confirmed an office expansion in King's Cross, Google Deepmind and Synthesia, as the companies fight for AI talent at British universities.
“Europe's largest businesses and fastest-growing startups are choosing Claude [its large language model], and we're scaling to match,” said Pip White, head of EMEA North at Anthropic in a statement yesterday, confirming it had chosen an unnamed London office. “The UK combines ambitious enterprises and institutions that understand what's at stake with AI safety with an exceptional pool of AI talent – we want to be where all of that comes together."
In the US, Anthropic has been at the centre of an ongoing legal battle with the Trump administration after it refused to allow its models to be used in mass surveillance and autonomous weapon systems. As part of its planned UK expansion, Anthropic says it will work more intensively with the UK’s AI Security Institute.
CoStar News can reveal the building it has chosen is the 300,000-square-foot 1 Triton Square, which is now nearly fully leased after British Land reported five completed deals totalling 71,000 square feet, including a 50,000-square-foot lease to Gilead Sciences in March.
The real estate investment trust said then that the activity underlined the depth of demand from science and technology-focused occupiers seeking "high quality, well connected space at Regent’s Place in the heart of London’s Knowledge Quarter".
Meta backstory
British Land and Royal London Asset Management Property formed a 50:50 joint venture to develop 1 Triton Square into a science and innovation building at Regent’s Place near Euston Station in London in March 2024. The agreement valued 1 Triton Square at £385 million with British Land receiving gross proceeds of £192.5 million from the sale of a 50% share in addition to £149 million surrender premium received from Facebook parent Meta. The REIT had surprised the market in September of 2023 when it secured the equivalent of seven years of rent from Meta, at a building it had leased but never moved in to.
British Land subsequently fleshed out its plans for the building. It explained that although Meta had secured an occupier to take over its lease, the REIT believed there was more value to be created by taking back the building given that market rents were significantly higher than the rent it was paying. It said it had a flexible plan to add lab space on the bottom floors as well as its Storey flexible offices platform "whilst retaining best-in-class office space on upper floors, which will accelerate our plans to reposition Regent's Place as London's premier innovation and life sciences campus".
Patrick Scanlon, senior director of market analytics, CoStar News, said: "The rapid rise in the use of artificial intelligence has generated notable office demand in recent months, with the London office market reaping the benefits. Software firm Databricks quadrupled its London office footprint by pre-letting the entire 139,000-square-foot Network Building in Fitzrovia from Derwent London, while in April, OpenAI announced its first permanent London office to support growing UK demand, acquiring around 77,000 square feet at Regent Quarter in King’s Cross."
Savills and Cushman & Wakefield advise BL and RLAM at 1 Triton Square. JLL and Kontor advised Anthropic.