Anthropic orders San Francisco staff remote amid possible security workers' strike

Anthropic sends San Francisco staff home

Anthropic instructed employees at its San Francisco offices to work remotely at the start of this week, according to Business Insider. The trigger was a warning that the workers guarding those offices might walk off the job.

Citing a person familiar with the situation, Business Insider reports that Allied Universal, the firm that supplies Anthropic's security personnel, notified the AI company last week that its employees could go on strike. Acting on that notice, Anthropic asked its own staff to stay away from the San Francisco offices on Monday and Tuesday as a precaution.

Anthropic declined to comment on the remote-work instruction, and Allied Universal did not respond to Business Insider's requests for comment.

The union says no strike was coming

The apparent walkout risk seems to have been news to the workers themselves. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents the Allied Universal employees, told Business Insider that it had not held a strike authorization vote and had issued no threats to strike this week.

The union says it is in lengthy contract talks with Allied Universal and other California security firms. SEIU, which covers thousands of security workers in the state, has been negotiating a new contract since April and is pressing for higher pay, better healthcare coverage and more thorough job training.

The result is a mismatch between Anthropic's caution and the union's public position: the company emptied its offices based on a contractor's warning, while the body representing the affected workers says no strike was planned for this week.

Context: threats, office policy and a pending IPO

Physical security has become a mounting concern across the AI industry. Business Insider notes that The Wall Street Journal previously reported that both Anthropic and OpenAI have faced multiple threats aimed at their employees — background that helps explain why Anthropic chose empty offices over a gamble on disputed strike warnings.

The directive also cuts against the company's normal working arrangements. According to job postings cited by Business Insider, Anthropic runs a hybrid policy that generally requires staff to be in the office at least a quarter of the time, so a blanket two-day remote order is unusual.

Timing adds another layer. Business Insider reports that Anthropic is expected to move ahead with an initial public offering as soon as August, having submitted a confidential draft S-1 in June, and that secondary-market investors have pushed its valuation to $1.5 trillion. A quiet, uneventful operational stretch is what most companies want ahead of a listing.

Why it matters

Frontier AI labs are not purely software operations. They run offices, rely on contractors and manage physical risk, and this episode shows how a labour dispute at a third-party security vendor can disrupt an entire headquarters within days. It also highlights how limited a company's visibility can be into its suppliers' workforce disputes: Anthropic acted on a warning that the union representing the workers in question says it never made. With employee threats already on record and a public listing reportedly close, the company judged two days of empty offices to be the cheaper option.