Jaan Tallinn led the Anthropic round behind Schmidt’s 1% stake

Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt owns about 1% of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Investors have been discussing a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion ahead of the share sale, which would put that holding at $15 billion to $20 billion. Bloomberg said it is unclear whether he has sold any of the stake since the first investment.

Schmidt put tens of millions of dollars into Anthropic’s Series A in May 2021, when the company was only a few months old. Dario and Daniela Amodei had left OpenAI with a small group of researchers and raised $124 million. Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn led the round, with Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Schmidt joining him. Secondary-market data put the post-money valuation of that round at about $623 million.

Google invested later. In late 2022 the search company reportedly paid around $300 million for roughly 10% of Anthropic, valuing it at about $3 billion, nearly five times the Series A price. Schmidt, who ran Google from 2001 to 2011 and stayed on as Alphabet’s executive chairman until 2018, had invested about a year and a half before his former company.

Not every early backer kept the gain. Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and Alameda Research put $500 million into Anthropic for a stake of about 8%. After FTX collapsed, its bankruptcy estate sold the entire holding in 2024 for roughly $1.3 billion to repay creditors.

Anthropic confidentially submitted draft IPO papers to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1. Reports say a public filing could come as early as October 26, with a listing expected in mid-November. At an investor day last week, Anthropic said third-quarter revenue rose 45% from the previous quarter to $16.8 billion and that it was profitable on an adjusted basis. The company made nearly $4.6 billion in revenue in all of 2025. Some investors left that meeting talking about a valuation closer to $1.5 trillion, below the roughly $2 trillion many had expected, because growth had slowed after revenue more than doubled between the first and second quarters this year. Even at the lower end, the 2021 cheque would be among the largest individual windfalls of the offering if Schmidt has held the full stake.