$1 billion in shares grabbed by sovereign wealth funds and others! Claude's parent company Anthropic becomes the darling of the market

On March 4th, the AI startup company Anthropic became the new darling of the AI industry with the launch of its AI model Claude 3, which outperformed GPT-4. Now, the capital market is closely watching this opportunity, with well-funded sovereign wealth funds competing to purchase Anthropic's on-sale shares worth over $1 billion.

However, according to sources, Anthropic has ruled out the possibility of receiving investment from Saudi Arabia. Despite excluding Saudi investment, Anthropic remains open to sovereign wealth funds from other countries, such as the Mubadala Fund of the United Arab Emirates, which is actively considering investing in it.

It is reported that the reason for Anthropic's share sale is that the original shareholder, the US cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has gone bankrupt and now needs to sell its Anthropic shares to repay debts, a process expected to be completed in the coming weeks. This 8% stake has become more valuable due to the hot AI industry, increasing from $500 million when FTX purchased it three years ago to over $1 billion now. Anthropic, with a previous valuation of $18.4 billion, has sold a portion of its non-voting Class B shares in this sale.

While the founders of Anthropic have the right to conduct due diligence on investors, they are currently not involved in fundraising activities related to FTX shares. Their acquaintance with FTX founder Bankman-Fried stems from a philosophy called effective altruism. Effective altruism is a philosophical idea centered around earning as much money as possible and then donating it all.

Over the past few years, Anthropic has raised approximately $7 billion from tech giants such as Amazon, Google, and Salesforce, but this share sale does not appear to involve further investments from these companies.