Former Google CEO Schmidt owns 1% stake in Anthropic, Bloomberg reports

Oct 19 (Reuters) - Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt owns about 1% of Anthropic, Bloomberg News reported on Monday. This could bring him one of the biggest personal profits when the AI startup sells shares to the public.

Schmidt invested tens of millions of dollars in Anthropic's Series A funding round, the report said, citing people who know about the matter. It was not clear whether he has sold any of his shares since then.

Anthropic and representatives for Schmidt did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.

Anthropic's planned initial public offering (IPO), when a company first sells shares to the public, is expected to bring large profits to early investors and employees.

Some investors discussed valuing Anthropic at about $1.5 trillion during an investor meeting. This was lower than earlier expectations of about $2 trillion, Reuters reported last week.

In its IPO prospectus, which Reuters saw in September, Anthropic described a future in which AI changes the world economy more deeply than industrialization, electricity and the internet did.

Amazon and Google were among Anthropic's early investors. They invested billions of dollars and provided the cloud computing power needed to develop and run its Claude AI models.

Schmidt was Google's CEO from 2001 to 2011. He later became executive chairman of Google's parent company, Alphabet, before leaving the role in January 2018.

(Reporting by Prakhar Srivastava in Bengaluru; Editing by Shreya Biswas)