With AI, investor loyalty is (virtually) lifeless: At least a dozen OpenAI VCs now also back Anthropic 

With AI, investor loyalty is (virtually) lifeless: At least a dozen OpenAI VCs now also back Anthropic 

With OpenAI on the verge of finalizing a new $100 billion round, and Anthropic just closing its personal monster $30 billion elevate, one factor is clear: The concept of investor “loyalty” is only hanging on by a thread. 

At least a dozen direct buyers in OpenAI had been announced as backers in Anthropic’s $30 billion elevate earlier this month, including Founders Fund, Iconiq, Insight Partners, and Sequoia Capital. 

Some twin investments are comprehensible if they arrive from the hedge fund or asset supervisor worlds, the place their focus is still largely investing in public shares (opponents or not). These embody D1, Fidelity, and TPG.  

One of these was a bit stunning. Affiliated funds of BlackRock joined in Anthropic’s $30 billion elevate even though BlackRock’s senior managing director and board member Adebayo Ogunlesi is also on OpenAI’s board of administrators. 

In that world, it’s true that if varied BlackRock funds get a probability to personal OpenAI inventory, they’re more likely to take it, never thoughts the private affiliation of a member of their senior management. (BlackRock runs every sort of fund, including mutuals, closed-ends, and ETFs). And everyone knows the historical past of OpenAI and Microsoft’s relationship and why Microsoft is hedging its bets. Ditto for Nvidia. 

But enterprise capital funds have — until now — operated otherwise.

VCs market themselves as “founder friendly” and “helpful,” the concept being that when a VC agency buys a chunk of a startup’s company, the investor will assist that startup achieve success, significantly against its major rivals. If you’re an proprietor of each OpenAI and Anthropic, who does your loyalty belong to, moreover your individual buyers?  

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Additionally, startups are non-public firms. They usually share confidential data with their direct buyers on their enterprise standing — data that isn’t disclosed publicly the means it is with public firms. In many instances, the VCs also take board seats, which carries another level of fiduciary accountability to their portfolio firms. 

What makes this explicit case even more attention-grabbing is that Sam Altman comes from the world of enterprise capital, as a former president of Y Combinator. He is aware of the drill. In 2024, he reportedly gave his buyers a record of OpenAI’s rivals that he didn’t need them to back. It largely included firms launched by people who left OpenAI, including Anthropic, xAI, and Safe Superintelligence. 

Altman later denied that he told OpenAI buyers they might be barred from future rounds in the event that they backed his record of perceived rivals. Altman did admit that he said in the event that they “made non-passive investments,” they might not obtain OpenAI’s confidential enterprise data, according to paperwork in the lawsuit between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Business Insider reported. 

AI is also breaking the mould because of the record-breaking quantities of cash that the largest AI labs are elevating as they experience never-before-seen development (and never-before-seen data heart wants). At some point, when the hat is being handed round, the wants are so nice and the prospects of returns are so large, who could be anticipated to say no? 

It turns out that not all enterprise buyers have yet slid down the slippery slope. Andreessen Horowitz backs OpenAI however not (yet) Anthropic. Menlo Ventures backs Anthropic however not (yet) OpenAI, as an example.

In fact, in our admittedly not exhaustive research, we discovered a dozen buyers that seem to only have direct investments in one in all these firms, not each. 

Others embody Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and Greenoaks. (Note: We initially requested Claude to offer us the record of twin buyers. It received virtually as many entries improper because it received proper, so all this for a very cool tech whose work sometimes stays less reliable than an intern’s.)

Still, as we beforehand reported, the fact that this longstanding rule has been tossed by some of the most revered corporations in the Valley, like Sequoia, is notable. One investor we reached out to easily shrugged and said that so long as the agency doesn’t have a board seat, nobody sees the hurt in it anymore.  

Still, conflict-of-interest insurance policies ought to now change into another factor that founders ask about before signing that time period sheet, regardless of who it’s from. 

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