Anthropic Is Paying £145k for an Executive Assistant in London. Here's What It Means

A post doing the rounds on LinkedIn this week says Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is offering a £145k salary for a personal assistant in London. The punchline: surely somebody should build a tool to do this autonomously. It is a good joke. It is also a more interesting signal than the joke suggests.

What the role actually is

The listing is titled Administrative Business Partner, GTM, based in London and supporting senior go-to-market leaders. Anthropic has advertised the same role family at a range of £120,000 to £145,000, and the version circulating this week is listed at £145,000. In plain English, it is an Executive Assistant role, and a senior one.

The responsibilities, as advertised, include:

• Managing calendars and tracking action items for senior leaders and their teams
• Building and maintaining systems for handling inbound requests
• Managing leaders' inboxes and communications, with fast and precise triage
• Handling travel and coordinating conferences and events with other teams
• Hosting in-person visitors and external partners
• Gathering materials for meetings, processing expenses and supporting ad-hoc projects

The requirements are just as telling: experience in heavily external-facing executive support, strong systems-building and prioritisation, proven discretion with sensitive information, and calm, positive communication with stakeholders at every level. The role is also office-based, with the listing indicating roughly three to four days a week in the office.

Why the irony misses the point

It is tempting to read this as a company that builds AI hiring a human to do work AI could do. But look at what the advert is really asking for. Scheduling and inbox triage are the tasks software handles best, and they are listed alongside the things software handles worst: hosting visitors, reading a room, building a system around how a particular leader actually works, and being trusted with sensitive information.

The best EAs have always been hired for the second group. The first group was simply the visible part of the job. As tools get better at the visible part, the invisible part becomes the whole job, and it is the part employers pay for.

What it tells us about the EA market

1. Judgement is being priced like a senior skill

A £145k salary for executive support is at the top end of the London market. For comparison, the most senior EA role we are currently recruiting sits at up to £80k. Anthropic is a well-funded company in a very specific position, so this is an outlier rather than a benchmark. But it shows that when a business takes executive support seriously, it will pay for the right person.

2. The title is changing, the job is not

“Business Partner” in the title is deliberate. Increasingly, companies are positioning top-tier executive support as a partnership role rather than an administrative one. If you are an EA, it is worth looking at how your own title and remit describe what you really do.

3. Adopting AI is part of the job, not a threat to it

The strongest EAs we speak to are already using AI for drafting, summarising and first-pass research. They are faster and take on more as a result. The skill that sets them apart is knowing what to check, what to escalate and what to leave alone.

4. Being in the room still matters

Hosting visitors, supporting events and sitting close to leadership are not tasks you can send to a model. An in-office requirement is a reminder that proximity and presence are still part of what great support looks like.

What founders should take from it

• Do not hire an EA to do what software already does. If the brief is mostly diary and inbox admin, tools will cover much of it. Hire for judgement, discretion and ownership.
• Be clear about the problem you are solving. Time, access, systems and trust are different needs, and the right hire depends on which one is holding you back.
• Pay for the person, not the task list. The gap between a competent EA and an exceptional one is far larger than the gap in salary.

What EAs should take from it

• Build the skills a tool cannot copy: discretion, relationship management, prioritisation under pressure and the ability to design systems around a leader.
• Get fluent with AI tools and be able to describe how they make you more effective.
• Be able to evidence the impact of your work, not just the activity.

The bottom line

The joke is that someone should build a tool to do this. They have, and it is genuinely useful. But the same company is still paying a premium for a person, because the value of a great executive assistant was never in the scheduling. It is in the trust, the judgement and the quiet confidence that things will be handled.

Details are based on the publicly advertised listing at the time of writing and may change.