Anthropic Hires Microsoft AI Executive

Anthropic recently hired a 16-year Microsoft veteran away from the software giant: Former Microsoft AI Platform president Eric Boyd is now the head of infrastructure at Anthropic.

"I'm excited to join the amazing team at Anthropic today where I'll be leading the Infrastructure team," Boyd wrote on LinkedIn today. "I've been privileged to have a front row seat to the explosion of LLMs, and the team at Anthropic is truly special. The combination of the absolute leading models with a culture that is committed to their mission is inspiring and I can't wait to lean in to help."

Geekwire reported a week ago that Boyd had left Microsoft after over 16 years. Before he surfaced at Anthropic today, Boyd had led the AI Platform team, which "delivers Microsoft Foundry" and Foundry IQ, while powering the company's first-party Copilot applications, for over 11 years. He reported to executive vice president Jay Parikh and oversaw about 1,500 workers, Bloomberg says. Before that, he was the general manager of the BingAds Development team.

While many Big AI companies poach executives from one another-Apple, in particular, has seen its AI teams gutted by rivals in recent months-it's not difficult to understand why Boyd would want to leave the Copilot behind for an AI that's well regarded and successful.

"AI is accelerating at an incredible pace, and the impact of Claude Code in the last six months, and particularly the last two months, just shows the power of what is possible," he wrote. "Bringing Powerful AI to the world in a way that brings the benefits to everyone will be so important, and I can't think of a better place to make this happen."