Eric Schmidt’s path to a $20 billion Anthropic windfall began with an introduction from Cami Clark

People familiar with the matter told Bloomberg Schmidt owns a 1% stake in the AI lab, which could be worth as much as $20 billion if Anthropic goes public at its $2 trillion target. Schmidt’s connection to Anthropic came through Cami Clark, the woman he dated for three years starting in 2011 before she started dating Dario Amodei in 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported. Clark introduced Schmidt to Amodei—whom she later married—and Schmidt visited the couple’s apartment in 2018, three years before Amodei co-founded Anthropic. Schmidt then joined Anthropic’s earliest investors in its $124 million Series A funding round in 2021, with sources telling Bloomberg his investment was in the tens of millions. 

Schmidt’s investment came when Anthropic was valued at $461 million, according to PitchBook data, and now five years later it’s valued at $965 billion after its May 28 funding round. This means that at a $2 trillion valuation, Anthropic would be worth more than 4,300 times its 2021 valuation. 

Anthropic did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment and a spokesperson for Schmidt declined to comment on the record.  

Anthropic’s financials

Schmidt is among a small group of early investors set to benefit from Anthropic’s IPO even as questions persist about whether AI companies can generate enough profits to justify their costs. An early Anthropic investor told Fortune’s Shawn Tully that the company’s shares could even trade at $2.4 trillion post-IPO, surpassing SpaceX’s $2.1 trillion market cap at the close of its first trading day in June. 

And Anthropic’s revenue growth has been staggering despite losses. Anthropic generated $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of this year, compared to $1.1 billion a year earlier, according to its S-1 reviewed  by The Wall Street Journal. Anthropic reported an $80.7 billion loss in the same time frame, but $72 billion came from an accounting charge tied to the rising value of its convertible debt and financing instruments. 

Developing its AI models also comes at a steep cost. Anthropic spent $9 billion on compute infrastructure in the first half of the year, up from $2.3 billion over the same period last year and more than all of its compute spend of $7.3 billion in 2025, according to the Journal’s reporting on Anthropic’s S-1. Anthropic has also signed $450 billion in mostly “noncancellable” cloud computing deals over the next decade. 

Anthropic would need annual profits of $59 billion to $79 billion to justify a $2 trillion IPO, and one risk outlined in the S-1 is a narrow customer base and uncertainty about getting enough compute. It’s seeking more capacity than its large cloud computing partners, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google, can provide, the Journal reported.