Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis Was Early Investor in Anthropic: Report

Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis was an early investor in Anthropic, the Financial Times reported.

The report added that Hassabis made an angel investment in Anthropic before the company emerged as one of the world’s fastest-growing AI startups. 

Anthropic is now in early talks to raise at least $30 billion in a new funding round that could value the company at more than $900 billion, potentially making it more valuable than OpenAI, valued at $852 billion.

Hassabis’s investment highlights his influence across the AI industry, where former researchers from Google DeepMind have launched more than a dozen startups since 2021, collectively raising at least $14 billion, according to PitchBook and Dealroom data cited by FT.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei considers Hassabis a role model, according to the report. Google has separately invested billions of dollars into the OpenAI rival through cloud and AI partnership agreements.

FT also reported that Hassabis has backed companies founded by former colleagues, including Inflection AI, launched by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, and Ineffable Intelligence, founded by longtime collaborator David Silver.

Meanwhile, senior DeepMind executives have moved into influential positions across Google’s AI operations. DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu was recently elevated to Chief AI Architect at Google, while Pushmeet Kohli was promoted to Chief Scientist at Google Cloud.

“Demis has a huge amount of soft power at Google and beyond,” Matt Clifford, Co-founder of Entrepreneurs First and a longtime associate of Hassabis, told FT. “He was a pioneer before it was obvious what AI was, and the availability of capital for his protégés is pretty striking.