LinkedIn just released its list of the top 10 Seattle startups: One problem, nearly half aren’t based in the region

What happened

LinkedIn’s list of Seattle’s hottest startups contains companies headquartered in California and Texas. First of all, four of the companies on LinkedIn’s list — Anthropic, Auger, Whatnot and Armada — are not even headquartered in the Seattle area. Anthropic is an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco.

San Francisco-based Anthropic — ranked #1 on LinkedIn’s Seattle startup list — has a growing engineering center at Dexter Yard North in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. But to think that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his team are cutting deals at the Washington Athletic Club or debating the future of AI over lattes in Kirkland is a hallucination (an AI system stating something that is not true) bigger than most AI models could create.

If the LinkedIn team were studying GeekWire’s coverage, they’d also realize that #2 on their list, Auger, is not headquartered in the Seattle area, either. The AI logistics startup, co-founded by former Amazon executive Dave Clark, moved its headquarters to Dallas in August, although it maintains a Bellevue engineering center.

Key facts

• LinkedIn’s list of Seattle’s hottest startups — includes: companies headquartered in California and Texas