Google is struggling to be at the frontier of the AI race, but its former CEO has a sizable stake in a firm at the very frontier.
Eric Schmidt, the man who ran Google for a decade, is sitting on a stake in Anthropic worth billions of dollars ahead of the ChatGPT rival’s IPO — and it all traces back to a check he wrote years before anyone outside Silicon Valley had heard of the company.
Schmidt owns around 1% of Anthropic PBC, according to people familiar with the matter, a position built on an early investment in the startup that could translate into one of the largest individual payouts once the company lists on public markets. He put in tens of millions of dollars as part of Anthropic’s Series A round, people familiar with the matter said, and it isn’t clear whether he has sold any portion of the stake since. Anthropic is reportedly targeting a valuation that could rival or exceed the largest IPOs in history, which would make even a 1% holding extraordinarily valuable.
How Schmidt Got In Early
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela, along with several other researchers who left OpenAI over disagreements about the direction of the company. Schmidt had an interesting personal connection to Anthropic — he had been in a relationship years earlier with Camilla “Cami” Clark, who would go on to marry Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Clark is widely reported to be the one who introduced Schmidt to Amodei, paving the way for his investment and giving the fledgling company an early vote of confidence from one of the best-known names in American tech. Clark herself has no formal role at Anthropic, but she has since been described in reporting as an influential, if unofficial, presence around the company.
Eric Schmidt’s tech career
Schmidt joined Google in 2001, brought in by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to provide adult supervision to a company that was still, at the time, a young startup. He served as Google’s chief executive officer from 2001 to 2011, a period in which the company grew from a search engine into a global technology power, before handing the CEO role back to Page and moving into the role of Executive Chairman.
Before Google, Schmidt had already built a reputation in Silicon Valley, serving as CEO of Novell and, earlier, as chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton and a master’s degree and PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley.
Since leaving his executive roles at Google’s parent company Alphabet, Schmidt has built a sprawling portfolio of ventures. He founded Schmidt Futures and, with his wife Wendy, Schmidt Sciences, both aimed at funding scientific research. He also chairs the Special Competitive Studies Project, a group focused on US competitiveness in AI, and currently serves as CEO of Relativity Space. He has co-authored books including “The New Digital Age” and “How Google Works,” and has been a vocal commentator on AI policy and the geopolitics of the technology race — a space Anthropic now sits at the center of.
Schmidt’s bet on Anthropic adds to a list of AI wins and warnings he’s been closely associated with in recent years, as the industry has gone from research labs to companies locking down massive compute deals and restricting how their technology gets used.
What The Stake Could Be Worth
Anthropic raised $65 billion in a Series H round in May at a $965 billion valuation, and has since filed confidentially for an IPO that bankers and investors reportedly expect could value the company at $2 trillion. A 2% stake at those numbers would be worth around $20 billion on paper, making Schmidt’s early check into Anthropic’s Series A one of the most lucrative personal bets to come out of the AI boom — rivaling the kind of early-investor windfalls usually reserved for venture funds, not individuals writing personal checks.