Anthropic responds to potential of strike action from security staff
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Anthropic has told workers in its San Francisco offices to work from home temporarily over personal security fears following reports that security guards responsible for protecting the facilities could go on strike.
The AI firm's security contractor, Allied Universal, recently warned that its security employees may strike, but ongoing mixed messaging left Anthropic taking the WFH measures as a precautionary move instead of a reaction to an actual walkout.
Per the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents many of Allied Universal's workers, no strike authorisation vote had been called.
The union also claimed not to have threatened a strike on these particular days, leading Anthropic's reaction to come as a surprise to the union itself.
However, the concerns aren't totally unfounded, with an underlying labor dispute ongoing. SEIU has been engaged in contract negotiations with Allied Universal and other California security companies since around April 2026, seeking higher wages, better healthcare benefits and more comprehensive job training for the thousands of workers it represents.
Neither Allied Universal nor Anthropic have commented on the ongoings. Importantly, Anthropic itself doesn't play an integral part in the worker negotiations, being just the employer of a third-party security company.
As for the landscape more broadly, security spending has risen sharply in recent years as companies seek to protect more valuable equipment, in light of major AI investments. Anthropic, at the forefront of AI investments and with its leading model families, could well be one of the biggest spenders in this category.
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Despite no evidence of a strike, Anthropic's decision to send workers home for two days would have minimized impacts virtually entirely, making it a smart precautionary move. Its workers are currently required to be in office around 25% of the time, per Business Insider.
The news comes as Anthropic could be on the cusp of becoming a publicly traded company. Current WSJ reporting points to the company boasting of potential revenue opportunities of more than $30 trillion, putting it ahead of SpaceX's $28.5 trillion estimate.
Anthropic is also said to be gunning for a valuation of around $2 trillion, per the WSJ, also above SpaceX's early valuation of $1.77 trillion. Secondary market trading has implied a slightly lower valuation of around $1.5 trillion.
While concerns over strikes are unlikely to have a major impact on the company's potential upcoming IPO, the fact that Anthropic is headquartered in San Francisco (at the heart of these ongoings) does make the temporary measure unwelcome at best.
The news also proves how the AI boom has created intertwined dependencies far deeper than data center hardware and software – physical security personnel also play a crucial role to the degree that instability poses potential risks to company offices.
