The announcement that revealed an unexpected detail about Anthropic's governance
A Bloomberg report published this week brought to light a figure that, taken in isolation, seems innocuous: Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, owns approximately 1% of Anthropic. The fact itself is not new — sources had suggested for months that the magnate had made an early bet on the company — but the context around that 1% is what makes the story significant for the entire artificial intelligence ecosystem.
Schmidt invested tens of millions of dollars in Anthropic's Series A round in 2021, when the company was valued at US$ 461 million, according to PitchBook data disclosed to Bloomberg. For comparison, the round raised US$ 124 million, led by Jaan Tallinn (Skype co-founder), with Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook co-founder) also participating. Schmidt, through multiple structures — Tomorrow Ventures, Innovation Endeavors Management, and his family office Hillspire — was one of the few independent investors present in that round.
What Bloomberg revealed, however, is that this 1% is approximately half of what Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO and co-founder, holds: about 2%. In any other technology company, you would expect the founder to control a significantly larger share than an external investor. But Anthropic is not a conventional technology company — it is, in effect, a risk holding company with a capital structure that radically separates voting power from economic ownership.
The Founder LLC structure and the collective control of the seven
The most interesting detail of the report is not the number itself, but what it reveals about Anthropic's control architecture. According to IPO prospectus documents seen by Reuters in September, Anthropic's seven co-founders are requesting shareholders approve a "Founder LLC" structure that would grant them 50.1% of collective voting power — as long as at least three of the seven maintain a minimum stake in the shares.
This means that Schmidt's 1%, while economically significant, has almost no political weight in the company's governance. Is he on the board? There is no evidence of that. Does he influence safety decisions? Probably no more than any other minority shareholder. What he has is a huge economic stake that could become one of the largest individual fortunes in technology history.
If Anthropic goes public with a valuation of US$ 2 trillion — the number investors have been discussing — Schmidt's 1% would be worth US$ 20 billion. That would raise Schmidt's estimated fortune, currently at US$ 57.5 billion, to near US$ 80 billion, according to Bloomberg's billionaires index. Even with the more conservative valuation of US$ 1.5 trillion that some investors mentioned after the October 14 investor day, the holding would be worth about US$ 15 billion.
The valuation disparity
The US$ 1.5 to 2 trillion valuation that investors are discussing is, for many independent analyses, completely disconnected from financial reality. New Constructs, a research firm, published a report on October 6 titled "Anthropic Is The Most Ridiculous IPO of 2026." According to the firm, to justify a US$ 2 trillion valuation, Anthropic would need to generate, by 2035, after-tax operating profits of US$ 358 billion — equivalent to 2.0 times Nvidia's profit (US$ 184 billion) and 2.6 times Apple's (US$ 136 billion) over the same period. Revenue would have to reach US$ 3.6 trillion, about 1.4 times the combined trailing revenue of Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta and Oracle.
In New Constructs' most optimistic scenario, with margins improving to 20% over a decade and 36% annual growth, the valuation would reach US$ 1.1 trillion — still 43% below the target. In the lowest scenario, with 20% annual growth from 2028, the equity valuation would be only US$ 144 billion. In other words, Anthropic would be valued 93% less than it intends.
This is not just an article about Eric Schmidt's wealth. It is an article about how power is being structured in the AI sector, and about the systemic risk of a valuation that may be up to 14 times higher than fundamental analysis justifies.
Schmidt is not the only independent investor with a significant stake — Amazon and Google were early backers, and names like Accel, Altimeter Capital, BlackRock and Baillie Giffard are also on the investor list. But Schmidt is the only one with such a deep history of technology investments (Uber, Google, Palantir) that gives unique historical weight to his bet on Anthropic.
The third-quarter revenue of US$ 16.8 billion, up 45% from the second quarter's US$ 11.6 billion, represents impressive growth. But in 2025, Anthropic generated US$ 4.6 billion in revenue while spending US$ 7.3 billion on compute alone. The question for investors is whether the company can scale revenue faster than compute costs — a problem that affects every AI model provider, not just Anthropic.
Sources: TechCrunch, The Next Web, Business Standard
✓ Independent sources cross-checked and verified before publishing
