California + Bay Area + Office | September 1, 2023

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to lease the 230,000-square-foot former Slack headquarters building in San Francisco.

AI Company Anthropic Subleases Former Slack Headquarters Building

Fast-growing artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to lease the entire former Slack headquarters building at Heitman’s 500 Howard St. in San Francisco, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The 230,000-square-foot sublease from Slack would be one of the largest local deals of the pandemic and the strongest sign yet that the AI boom is lifting the city’s downtown office market and economy.

Slack owner Salesforce is among the investors in Anthropic, which seeks to build more ethical AI tools, including a chatbot named Claude. Anthropic has raised over $1.1 billion from investors including Google and Spark Capital.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, confirmed the sublease but stopped short of identifying the company on an earnings call last week, reported the Chronicle.

“We’re seeing the development of ethical AI with amazing companies like Anthropic, Cohere, Hugging Face and some others,” Benioff said. “I just heard one of them just subleased our entire Slack building, but I’m not allowed to say who it is, but I couldn’t be more excited about that because we’re really seeing downtown San Francisco become AI Central.”

Photo credit: HaeB/Wikipedia.

Connect Orange County will take place Sept. 27, 2023 at VEA | Newport Beach Marriott in Newport Beach, concurrently with Connect Healthcare Real Estate on Sept. 27 and 28. Click here to register for Connect Orange County, and here to register for Connect Healthcare Real Estate.

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About Paul Bubny

Paul Bubny serves as Senior Content Director for Connect Commercial Real Estate, a role to which he brings 13-plus years’ experience covering the commercial real estate industry and 30-plus years in business-to-business journalism. In this capacity, he oversees daily operations while also reporting on both local/regional markets and national trends, covering individual transactions across all property types, as well as delving into broader subject matter. He produces 15-20 daily news stories per day and works with the Connect team and clients to develop longer-form content, ranging from Q&As to thought-leadership pieces. Prior to joining Connect, Paul was Managing Editor for both Real Estate Forum and GlobeSt.com at American Lawyer Media, where he oversaw operations at both publications while also producing daily news and feature-length articles. His tenure in B2B publishing stretches back into the print era, and he has served as Editor in Chief on four national trade publications. Since 1999, Paul has volunteered as the newsletter editor of passenger rail advocacy groups (one national, one local).

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