Business 4 min read By Alice Ashford
Eric Schmidt's 1% Anthropic stake could be worth $20bn after IPO
The former Google chief executive holds a 1% stake in Anthropic, acquired through an introduction from Cami Clark, now married to Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei. The AI lab is preparing to go public as soon as next month with a $2 trillion target valuation.
Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, owns a 1% stake in Anthropic that could be worth as much as $20 billion if the artificial intelligence company goes public at its $2 trillion target valuation, according to people familiar with the matter. The AI lab is preparing to list as soon as next month, turning an early bet made five years ago into one of the most lucrative personal investments in Silicon Valley.
Schmidt's route into Anthropic ran through Cami Clark, whom he dated for three years from 2011. Clark later began dating Dario Amodei in 2014 and eventually married him. She introduced Schmidt to Amodei, and Schmidt visited the couple's apartment in 2018, three years before Amodei co-founded Anthropic. Schmidt then joined the company's earliest backers in its $124 million Series A round in 2021, with sources putting his investment in the tens of millions.
At the time of that round, Anthropic was valued at $461 million, according to PitchBook data. Its valuation reached $965 billion after a funding round on 28 May. At a $2 trillion listing, the company would be worth more than 4,300 times its 2021 valuation. Anthropic declined to comment, and a spokesperson for Schmidt declined to comment on the record.
Schmidt is among a small group of early investors set to benefit from the listing, even as questions persist about whether AI companies can generate enough profit to justify their costs. One early Anthropic investor told Fortune that the shares could trade at $2.4 trillion after the IPO, which would surpass SpaceX's $2.1 trillion market capitalisation at the close of its first trading day in June.
Anthropic's revenue growth has been rapid despite heavy losses. The company generated $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of this year, compared with $1.1 billion a year earlier, according to its S-1 filing. It reported an $80.7 billion loss over the same period, although $72 billion of that came from an accounting charge tied to the rising value of its convertible debt and financing instruments.
Building AI models remains expensive. Anthropic spent $9 billion on computing infrastructure in the first half of the year, up from $2.3 billion a year earlier and more than its entire $7.3 billion compute spend in 2025. The company has also signed $450 billion in mostly non-cancellable cloud computing deals over the next decade.
To justify a $2 trillion IPO, Anthropic would need annual profits of between $59 billion and $79 billion. Its filing flags a narrow customer base and uncertainty over securing enough computing capacity as risks. The company is seeking more capacity than its large cloud partners — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google — can provide.
The scale of Schmidt's potential windfall underscores how early relationships and personal networks continue to shape the financing of the AI sector. For a company still lossmaking and dependent on vast infrastructure spending, the listing will test whether public markets accept the growth story behind those valuations.
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