Anthropic has hired former Amazon Web Services (AWS) threat intelligence specialist Dlshad Othman to join its safeguards group.

Othman, who began the role this week, will focus on areas spanning influence operations, surveillance and cyber threat investigations.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Othman previously spent six years at AWS working in cyber threat intelligence, including investigations into government-backed hacking groups and large-scale security cases. His background also includes building automation to support fast-moving security operations and investigating incidents related to geopolitical events.

Othman noted that much of his prior threat-intel work did not appear publicly, even as he collaborated with teams both inside and outside Amazon. 

"Most of my work in cyber threat intelligence stays out of public view, so I'm grateful for all the offline collaboration with folks within Amazon and outside of it, trying to make the life of threat actors a living hell," he told ETIH.

Othman also tied his decision to join Anthropic to the idea that protective controls need to be engineered where frontier AI is built and deployed. "Powerful AI models are where the problem lives. They're also where the solution has to be built, with the safeguards, the research, and the mission-driven teams to do it seriously. That's why I'm here," he said in a Linkedin post announcing the job change.

He added that the scope felt both exciting and intimidating, calling himself "grateful for the chance to work on it, and a little daunted by it, which feels about right." 

Earlier this month, Anthropic hired co-founder of OpenAI and former director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vison at Tesa, Andrej Karpathy. He is expected to create a new team focused on using Claude itself to speed up research on pre-training, an Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Anthropic Accumulates Funding

Anthropic recently overtook OpenAI as the world’s most valuable startup after raising $65 billion in Series H, valuing the company at $965 billion. Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital led the funding round.

“This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens," said Krishna Rao, Chief Financial Officer of Anthropic.

Earlier this month, Anthropic announced a partnership with Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI to use all of the compute capacity at SpaceX’s data center Colossus 1 in Memphis, Tennessee. The partnership will give Anthropic more than 300 megawatts of additional capacity (over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs) to deploy within the month and will increase limits for Claude Code and the Claude API.

The firm's latest AI model, Claude Opus 4.8, aims to deliver improved performance and new controls for customers and developers, the company also announced this week.

Anthropic is in the midst of working on Project Glasswing, an AI-assisted security testing effort that more than 50 organizations are collaborating on. Anthropic released an update regarding the project last week.

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