Biz Carson and Tom Maloney
Anthropic’s latest funding round has vaulted the AI firm’s seven founders into the ranks of the world’s 500 richest people, the most from one company to be added in a single day in Bloomberg Billionaires Index history.
Led by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, the founders each own less than 1 per cent of the company, according to wealth index calculations, but their individual stakes are worth about $US8 billion ($11.2 billion) after Anthropic raised $US65 billion at a $US965 billion valuation.
Along with the Amodeis, other Anthropic co-founders joining Bloomberg’s wealth list for the first time are Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Christopher Olah.
A spokesperson for Anthropic declined to comment.
The artificial intelligence boom has created an explosion of wealth both in public and private markets over the past few years. Jensen Huang, co-founder of AI chipmaker Nvidia, has seen his fortune rise to more than $US177 billion from $US10.9 billion in October 2022, making him the eighth-richest person on the wealth index.
Bloomberg this month identified 19 new AI billionaires — collectively worth $US59 billion — to emerge from the latest round of buzzy startups, ranging from the founders of Cerebras Systems, which went public earlier this month, to Surge Lab’s Edwin Chen, who’s now worth $US13 billion.
San Francisco-based Anthropic was started in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI employees who left following disagreements over the company’s future direction. Known for its chatbot Claude and tools for businesses, Anthropic expects to post $US10.9 billion in revenue for the second quarter, more than doubling from the prior three-month period, Bloomberg previously reported.
Leapfrogs OpenAI
With the latest funding round, which was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, Anthropic eclipsed OpenAI in valuation for the first time. San Francisco-based OpenAI was valued at $US852 billion following a funding round in March.
Bloomberg’s calculations of the co-founders’ stakes rely on Pitchbook data and reporting about Anthropic’s previous funding rounds, and are adjusted to account for typical equity grants to non-founding employees based on data from Carta.
Anthropic and OpenAI are both expected to go public, possibly later this year, Bloomberg News has reported. Anthropic is still expected to proceed with an IPO on that timeline after the latest funding round, one person said.
While much of their net worth is still on paper, Anthropic’s founders have pledged to give away 80 per cent of their fortunes. CEO Dario Amodei has said he worries about the concentration of wealth that could come out of the AI industry, especially its potential effect on everything from tax policy to democracy and political influence.
“The thing to worry about is a level of wealth concentration that will break society,” he wrote in a January 2026 essay.
“Those who are at the forefront of AI’s economic boom should be willing to give away both their wealth and their power.”
Bloomberg
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