by Fred Fuld III
The word “Anthropic” comes from the Greek word anthrōpos which means “human” or “humanity.”
In physics and philosophy, you might hear of the “anthropic principle”—the idea that observations of the universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it.
For the company, the founders chose the name as a literal statement of intent: to keep artificial intelligence centered on, aligned with, and safe for humanity. It acts as a daily reminder of their core mission, ensuring that as models grow exponentially more powerful, they remain fundamentally beneficial to human beings.
A Short History of Anthropic
1. The Great OpenAI Schism (2020)
In 2020, Dario Amodei was the Vice President of Research at OpenAI, leading the team that built groundbreaking models like GPT-2 and GPT-3. His sister, Daniela Amodei, was OpenAI’s Vice President of Safety and Policy.
As OpenAI shifted from a pure non-profit to a “capped-profit” structure and signed a massive commercial partnership with Microsoft, the Amodeis and a group of roughly five to ten top OpenAI researchers grew deeply concerned. They felt that commercial pressures were forcing OpenAI to rush powerful models to market before fully understanding how to control them—a dilemma known as the “AI alignment problem.”
2. The Launch (2021)
Unable to resolve these strategic differences, the group left OpenAI. In 2021, they founded Anthropic PBC as a Public Benefit Corporation. This specific legal structure frees them from the traditional corporate obligation to maximize shareholder profit at all costs, legally protecting their right to prioritize safety over speed.
3. Creating “Constitutional AI” (2022)
To build a safer AI, Anthropic pioneered a technique called Constitutional AI. Instead of relying entirely on human reinforcement (where humans manually read and flag thousands of toxic AI responses), they gave their AI a written “constitution”—a set of principles borrowed from documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Apple’s terms of service. They then trained the AI to critique and correct its own behavior based on those rules.
4. Claude and the Trillion-Dollar Backing (2023–Present)
In early 2023, Anthropic released its flagship chatbot, Claude, to rival ChatGPT. Claude quickly developed a reputation in the industry for possessing a massive “context window” (the amount of text it can process at once) and exhibiting a lower tendency to hallucinate.
Recognizing Anthropic as the premier alternative to OpenAI, tech giants rushed to back them. Amazon and Alphabet poured billions into the company, transforming a small group of worried researchers into a massive corporate ecosystem valued at hundreds of billions of dollars.
Anthropic is currently a private company, meaning it does not have shares available for direct purchase on public stock exchanges. However, several publicly traded companies hold significant stakes in it as investors.
Key Publicly Traded Investors
The three primary publicly traded companies with major investments in Anthropic are:
- Amazon (AMZN): Amazon has invested billions of dollars in Anthropic. A significant portion of this investment involves providing cloud computing infrastructure via Amazon Web Services (AWS) and access to its custom AI chips. Estimates suggest Amazon holds a substantial stake, often cited in the range of 18%.
- Alphabet (GOOG / GOOGL): Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is also a major investor. Like Amazon, Alphabet provides Anthropic with cloud computing resources (Google Cloud) and access to its specialized AI hardware. Alphabet’s stake is estimated at approximately 14%.
- Zoom Video Communications (ZM) owns a stake in Anthropic. While tech giants like Amazon and Google get most of the attention for their multi-billion-dollar investments, Zoom made a highly successful early-stage bet on the AI startup that has quietly turned into a massive windfall.
How Much Did Zoom Invest?
Through its investment arm, Zoom Ventures, the company made an initial strategic investment of approximately $51 million in Anthropic in May 2023. At the time, the deal was primarily positioned as a partnership to integrate Anthropic’s Claude AI models directly into Zoom’s software architecture. Zoom later followed this up with an additional private investment of about $46 million.
How Much is Zoom’s Stake Worth?
In a regulatory filing, Zoom officially disclosed that its minority stake in Anthropic was valued at $1.27 billion, representing an unrealized gain of over $1 billion from its initial investment.
However, because Anthropic’s private valuation has continued to skyrocket, Wall Street analysts view this as a moving target:
- The Baseline Valuation: Zoom’s $1.27 billion valuation mark on its balance sheet was calculated from a prior Anthropic fundraising round that valued the AI startup at $380 billion.
- The Current Trajectory: With Anthropic continuously raising capital—including a massive multi-billion-dollar round pushing its valuation toward the $900 billion to $1 trillion range—analysts at firms like Baird estimate that Zoom’s stake, even after accounting for dilution, is actually worth anywhere from $2 billion to $4 billion.
Why This Matters for Investors
While a $2 billion to $4 billion stake is relatively small on the balance sheets of trillion-dollar mega-caps like Google or Amazon, it is incredibly significant for a company of Zoom’s size.
With Zoom’s total market capitalization hovering around $27 billion (and roughly $7.8 billion of that sitting in pure cash), its Anthropic holding represents a massive percentage of its overall corporate value. Because retail investors cannot buy private shares of Anthropic directly, many in the stock market are treating Zoom as a unique, highly reactive “proxy stock” to gain indirect exposure to Anthropic’s pre-IPO growth.
Other Ways to Gain Exposure
Because Anthropic is not yet public, investors looking for exposure to the company have historically relied on a few indirect methods:
- Publicly Traded Investors: As noted above, buying shares in Amazon or Alphabet is the most common way for public market investors to gain indirect exposure to Anthropic’s growth.
- Investment Funds/ETFs: Some closed-end funds and investment trusts, such as the Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust, have gained exposure to Anthropic by investing in it while it remains private.
- Pre-IPO Platforms: There are specialized, niche platforms that allow accredited or institutional investors to purchase private shares of companies before they go public. Additionally, some derivatives platforms (such as Kraken, in certain regions) have offered “pre-IPO perpetual” contracts, which allow traders to speculate on a company’s valuation before it officially lists.
IPO Status
Anthropic is widely expected to go public in the near future. While it has not yet completed an IPO, it is considered one of the most highly anticipated upcoming equity offerings alongside companies like OpenAI. Please note that market conditions and regulatory environments can influence the timing of these filings.
Disclosure: Author owns AMZN. No investment recommendations are expressed or implied.