Anthropic Snaps Up 420,000 Square Feet of Offices

Anthropic is continuing to gobble up office space across San Francisco.

The Dario Amodei-led artificial intelligence firm leased 300 Howard Street, grabbing all 420,000 square feet at the 25-story office tower, the San Francisco Business Times reported, citing a source familiar with the matter. The deal also includes the neighboring three-story, 60,000-square-foot building at 342 Howard Street on the same parcel, long the home of Town Hall restaurant.

With the 300 Howard lease, the office tower will go from fully vacant to 100 percent occupied. The sudden lease-up comes less than a year after the building was acquired by a joint venture of locally based investor DivcoWest and asset management firm Blackstone for more than $111.3 million. When it closed last April, it was the priciest office deal in San Francisco in the post-pandemic years. Upon purchase, the joint venture planned to revamp the structure from an “early 2000s tower into a high-performance hub built for today’s most ambitious teams,” according to the Business Times.

Anthropic has been growing its holdings in San Francisco over the past year. The firm is currently based in approximately 250,000 square feet at 500 Howard Street, two blocks away from 300 Howard. Late last year, it leased another 100,000 square feet at 505 Howard.

AI companies have been key players in San Francisco’s office comeback. In the fourth quarter, the city saw a decrease of nearly 2 million square feet in vacant or available space, marking the largest drop in office availability in four consecutive quarters of decline. Approximately 60 percent of demand for offices is from tech companies, with nearly half of those being AI startups, the San Francisco Business Times reported, citing CBRE data. — Chris Malone Méndez