Former Google CEO Schmidt owns 1% stake in Anthropic, Bloomberg reports
FILE PHOTO: Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Futures and former CEO and chairman of Google, speaks at the 2023 Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., on May 2, 2023. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo
Oct 19: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt owns about 1 per cent of Anthropic, Bloomberg News reported on Monday. This could put him among the people who make the most money when the AI startup sells shares to the public for the first time.
Schmidt invested tens of millions of dollars in Anthropic's Series A funding round, the report said. It cited 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 reply to Reuters' requests for comment.
Anthropic's planned first sale of shares to the public, known as an initial public offering (IPO), is expected to bring large gains to its early investors and employees.
Some investors discussed a possible company value of around $1.5 trillion at 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 said it believes AI will change 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, and stepped down from that role in January 2018.