Anthropic confirmed it is designing custom chips for Claude. It wants engineers who have “shipped silicon.”

Anthropic confirmed on Wednesday that it is building an in-house silicon team to design custom chips for Claude, the first time the company has publicly acknowledged the effort. A spokesperson told Business Insider the company would co-design hardware and models, allowing Claude to run faster and more efficiently “at the scale our customers need.” The company said it has taken and will continue to take a “multi-chip approach,” with hardware from AWS, Google, Nvidia, and AMD remaining central to its scaling.

A job listing posted by the company details a “custom silicon team” and seeks engineers with expertise across chip design and verification. The salary range is $320,000 to $485,000. Candidates must demonstrate “direct personal contribution” to the finalisation and shipping of semiconductor designs. “This is a role for someone who has shipped silicon, has a realistic relationship with schedules, and is comfortable making consequential calls without a large organization behind them,” the listing reads.

The confirmation follows months of signals. Reuters reported in April that Anthropic was exploring custom chips as Claude’s run-rate revenue surged past $30 billion. At the time, no dedicated team existed. The Information reported last month that Anthropic had held talks with Samsung as a potential manufacturing partner. The hire of Clive Chan, who previously helped build OpenAI’s chip programme, signalled the company was moving from exploration to active development. Today’s confirmation makes it official.

Anthropic is not alone. OpenAI unveiled Jalapeño in June, a custom inference chip developed with Broadcom that targets late 2026 deployment. Meta plans to put its in-house “Iris” chip into production in September. Mistral’s CEO has said the French company is considering building its own silicon. Designing an AI chip costs roughly $500 million, according to industry sources, but the economics improve at Anthropic’s scale. The company currently runs Claude across Google TPUs, Amazon Trainium, Nvidia GPUs, and AMD hardware. Adding its own silicon would give it a fifth option, one it controls entirely.