Anthropic is lining up a new slate of investors, but the AI startup has ruled out Saudi Arabia
Deep-pocketed, sovereign wealth funds are among the investors clamoring to get a stake in Anthropic, the red-hot artificial intelligence startup that’s taking on OpenAI. One country that’s being left out: Saudi Arabia.
As bankers line up a group of potential new Anthropic backers, the company has ruled out taking money from the Saudis, according to people familiar with the matter. Anthropic executives cited national security, one of the sources told CNBC.
The stake in Anthropic is for sale because it belongs to FTX, the failed cryptocurrency exchange started by Sam Bankman-Fried, and is being unloaded as part of the company’s bankruptcy proceedings. FTX bought the shares three years ago for $500 million. The 8% stake is now worth more than $1 billion due to the recent boom in AI.
Proceeds from the sale will be used to repay FTX customers. The transaction is ongoing and is on track to wrap up in the next couple weeks, said people with knowledge of the talks who asked not to be named because the negotiations are private.
The class B shares, which don’t come with voting rights, are being sold at Anthropic’s last valuation of $18.4 billion, sources said. Anthropic has raised roughly $7 billion in the last few years from tech giants like Amazon, Alphabet and Salesforce. Its large language model competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Anthropic founders Dario and Daniela Amodei have the right to challenge any potential investors, according to the sources. However, they are not involved in the current fundraising process, or in the discussions with potential investors in FTX’s stake. The founders were introduced to Bankman-Fried through “effective altruism,” a philosophy that involves making as much money as possible to give it all away.
Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman meets U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken (not pictured), in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia March 20, 2024.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
While Anthropic’s founders told bankers they wouldn’t accept Saudi money, they don’t plan to challenge funding from other sovereign wealth funds, including United Arab Emirates fund Mubadala. The UAE-based firm is actively looking at investing, according to one of the sources.
The potential buyers of FTX’s shares comprise a syndicate of new investors for Anthropic, a source said, meaning Amazon and Alphabet would not be involved. Part of FTX’s stake is being shopped around through special purpose vehicles, or SPV, which allows multiple investors to pool capital. SPVs have been emailing venture firms to solicit participation, three sources said. Investment bank Perella Weinberg is handling the sale on behalf of FTX.
Representatives from Anthropic and Perella Weinberg declined to comment on the sale. Mubadala and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, or PIF, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The PIF, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, has more than $900 billion in assets and has been plowing capital into technology to diversify the nation’s revenue away from oil. The fund is in talks with venture firm Andreessen Horowitz to create a $40 billion fund to invest in AI, two sources with knowledge of the matter told CNBC. The discussions were first reported by the New York Times.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s ambitious “Vision 2030 Initiative” has looked to modernize the economy and strengthen ties in global finance. The PIF has investments in companies including Uber, while also funding the LIV golf league and spending heavily in professional soccer and tennis.
Anthropic’s national security concerns regarding Saudi Arabia could be over dual-use technology — software or tech that can be used for both civilian and military applications. That’s an area of notable focus for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which can block foreign investments from particular sources in certain areas. Saudi Arabia has also been warming to China.
The kingdom’s human rights record remains a major problem for some Western partners. The most notable case in recent years was the alleged killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, an event that triggered international backlash in the business community.
In November, Bankman-Fried was convicted of seven criminal counts tied to the collapse of FTX. His sentencing is scheduled for next week, and prosecutors are recommending a sentence of 40 to 50 years.
WATCH: Prosecutors recommend a 40-50 year prison sentence for SBF
The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
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