Oct 19 : Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt owns about 1 per cent of Anthropic, positioning him for one of the largest individual windfalls when the AI startup goes public, Bloomberg News reported on Monday.
• Schmidt invested tens of millions of dollars in Anthropic’s Series A funding round, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. It was unclear whether he has sold any of his stake since.
• Schmidt’s representatives declined to comment. Anthropic did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
• Anthropic’s planned initial public offering is expected to generate substantial returns for its early investors and employees.
• Some investors discussed a valuation of around $1.5 trillion at an investor meeting, below earlier expectations of roughly $2 trillion, Reuters reported last week.
• In its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters in September, Anthropic laid out a vision that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet.
• Amazon and Google were among Anthropic’s early backers, investing billions of dollars and supplying the cloud computing capacity required to develop and run its Claude AI models.
• Schmidt served as Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011 and later as executive chairman of its parent company, Alphabet, before stepping down in January 2018.