Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt owns about 1% of Anthropic, Bloomberg reports

AI-generated illustration for Mezha

Eric Schmidt's reported ownership could make him one of the biggest individual winners if Anthropic becomes a public company.

Bloomberg News reported on Monday that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt owns about 1% of Anthropic. According to the report, Schmidt invested tens of millions of dollars in the AI startup during its Series A funding round. The report cited people who know about the investment. It is not clear whether Schmidt has sold any of his shares.

This was reported by Reuters.

Anthropic and representatives for Schmidt did not immediately respond when Reuters asked them to comment. Anthropic is planning to sell shares to the public for the first time in an initial public offering (IPO). This could bring large profits to people who invested early and to the company's employees.

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

In a document for its planned IPO that Reuters saw in September, Anthropic described a future in which AI would change the world economy more deeply than the Industrial Revolution, electricity or 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 Anthropic's Claude AI models.

Schmidt was Google's CEO from 2001 to 2011. He later served as executive chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company. He left that role in January 2018.