Democrat mega-donor Eric Schmidt stands to add up to $10 billion — and possibly far more — to his fortune from his stake in Anthropic, the same AI company leading the push for "safety" frameworks that would let a handful of insiders control what Americans can do with artificial intelligence.
The former Google CEO invested tens of millions in Anthropic's 2021 Series A round, when the startup was valued at $461 million, according to Bloomberg data cited by both Breitbart and TNW. Now, with Anthropic preparing an IPO that could value the company between $1.8 trillion and $2 trillion, Schmidt's 1% stake could be worth up to $20 billion — pushing his net worth from $57.5 billion to nearly $80 billion. Even at Anthropic's most recent private valuation of $965 billion, the holding is worth roughly $9.7 billion.
Follow the money. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been among the loudest voices demanding an AI "slowdown," laying out a three-step plan to "temper the AI industry's development pace" — without, he insists, "halting model training or technical progress." Instead, companies would need to "take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this." Breitbart framed Amodei's push as part of the "AI doomer movement"; TNW didn't mention the safety agenda at all. But the pattern is plain: the people calling hardest for AI gatekeeping are the ones positioned to profit from controlling the gates.
Anthropic claims it has already given third-party evaluators employee-level access to verify safety practices — a move Amodei said comes "without sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States' lead." The rules they want imposed on everyone else, in other words, won't slow Anthropic down.
Schmidt isn't the only one cashing in. Anthropic's seven co-founders are each worth $8 billion based on the last funding round, and the IPO is expected to mint a new class of billionaires tied to the Effective Altruism movement — the same crowd that insists AI must be tightly controlled for the greater good, per Breitbart's reporting.
Not everyone buys the valuation. Some investors are pushing for a lower $1.5 trillion figure after weaker third-quarter results, and research firm New Constructs called the planned listing the year's "most ridiculous IPO," putting Anthropic's real value at $144 billion. Google and Amazon, both major Anthropic backers providing cloud infrastructure for its Claude models, have poured billions into the company.
The IPO could land as soon as November, with Anthropic aiming to match or exceed SpaceX's record $1.77 trillion debut.
The question isn't whether Schmidt and his allies will get richer. It's whether Americans will let the same people who built the censorship apparatus at Google construct a new one for AI — dressed up as "safety" while they pocket the proceeds.
