Schmidt's 1% Anthropic stake could hit $20 billion at $2 trillion IPO

Schmidt's path into Anthropic runs through a personal relationship rather than a boardroom. He dated Cami Clark for three years starting in 2011; she later began dating Dario Amodei in 2014 and eventually married him. Clark introduced Schmidt to Amodei, and Schmidt visited the couple's apartment in 2018—three years before Amodei co-founded Anthropic. When Anthropic raised its $124 million Series A in 2021, Schmidt joined the earliest investors with tens of millions of dollars, at a time when PitchBook data put the company's valuation at $461 million.

That early entry is what makes the potential payoff so large. Anthropic was valued at $965 billion after its May 28 funding round, and at a $2 trillion IPO target the company would be worth more than 4,300 times its 2021 valuation. Schmidt's 1% stake, as reported by Bloomberg's sources, would be worth as much as $20 billion under that scenario—though neither Anthropic nor Schmidt's spokesperson would comment on the record.

The IPO conversation is unfolding against a mixed financial picture. Anthropic's revenue reached $16.3 billion in the first half of this year, compared with $1.1 billion a year earlier, but it reported an $80.7 billion loss, $72 billion of which came from an accounting charge tied to the rising value of its convertible debt. Compute spending rose to $9 billion in the first half, up from $2.3 billion a year earlier and above all of its $7.3 billion in compute spend for 2025. Anthropic has also signed $450 billion in mostly noncancellable cloud deals over the next decade, and its S-1 flags a narrow customer base and uncertainty about securing enough compute as risks.