STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -U.S. AI startup Anthropic said on Friday it was planning to expand its operations across Europe, and open offices in the French capital Paris and Munich in Germany.

The move comes on the heels of a large-scale global expansion by Anthropic to triple its international workforce to meet a rise in demand for its Claude AI large language models outside the United States.

San Francisco-based Anthropic, last valued at $183 billion and backed by Google-parent Alphabet and Amazon.com ( AMZN ), was formed in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI employees.

It has offices in London, Dublin and Zurich in Europe, and has tripled the number of employees in the region last year.

"EMEA has become our fastest-growing region, with a run-rate revenue that has grown more than 9 times in the past year," the company said in a statement.

Anthropic, which counts European companies such as L'Oréal, BMW, SAP, Lovable and N26 as its clients, said its European workforce will span every aspect of its business, from research and engineering to sales and operations.