OpenAI and Anthropic enter Israel, with local partners supplying the forward-deployed work

Globes reports (Oct 21) that OpenAI and Anthropic have both taken their first concrete steps into the Israeli market this month. OpenAI hired two senior local executives, Motti Hadas and Ido Perlson, who report to its UK division, and already works through Israeli partners CloudZone, Abra and AllCloud. Anthropic picked the same three firms as partners after a selection process that, according to CloudZone, requires staff to retake Anthropic certification every six months.

The target customers are banks, health funds, government ministries and the defense establishment, which want custom applications, local compliance, integration with existing systems and strict security rather than self-serve accounts. Industry figures quoted in the piece say this has created the forward deployed engineer role locally: engineers who tailor AI tools to a client, build projects on them and monitor usage. They add that contracts bundling FDE services tend to be larger and make clients more dependent on the vendor.

For FDEs, the story shows how labs are expanding into new countries: a few direct hires plus certified partners that do most of the hands-on deployment work. In markets like Israel, many FDE-style jobs may sit at integrators such as CloudZone rather than at the labs themselves, and the article notes that partner-delivered projects squeeze vendor margins compared with Palantir's model.