Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is revealed to hold a 1% stake in Anthropic, which could be valued at the level of tens of billions of US dollars before the company's IPO.

In the power games of Silicon Valley, few people understand the art of "positioning" better than Eric Schmidt.

The 71-year-old former CEO of Google led the company from 2001 to 2011, and later served as Executive Chairman of parent company Alphabet until 2018. He experienced the golden age of search advertising and witnessed Google's expansion from a search engine startup into a global tech giant. What makes Schmidt truly remarkable, however, is how he continued to participate in the AI race with capital after leaving Google's power center.

On October 19, 2026, Bloomberg cited people familiar with the matter reporting that Schmidt holds approximately 1% of the shares in Anthropic, a stake that originated from his tens of millions of dollars of investment in the Series A round in 2021. At that time, Anthropic was valued at only 461 million US dollars. Now as Anthropic is about to launch its IPO, the valuation discussed by investors has been revised down from the previous target of around 2 trillion US dollars to roughly 1.5 trillion US dollars. Even calculated based on the 1.5 trillion US dollar valuation, the 1% stake in Schmidt's hands is worth nearly 15 billion US dollars; if the IPO pricing can approach the previous target valuation of about 2 trillion US dollars again, the value of this stake will reach around 200 billion US dollars. It is currently unclear whether he has sold any shares in subsequent rounds, and both Schmidt's side and Anthropic have refused to comment.

A noteworthy detail is that Schmidt is Google's former CEO, and Google happens to be one of Anthropic's biggest supporters. Alphabet currently holds about 14% of Anthropic's shares and has committed up to 400 billion US dollars in investment; Amazon, NVIDIA and Microsoft have also participated in key financing rounds of the Claude developer through strategic investments or Series G financing. Schmidt did not invest in the capacity of Google, but completed the investment through his family office Hillspire, as well as platforms including TomorrowVentures and Innovation Endeavors. In other words, outside the company he once led, he used his personal capital to bet on one of Google's core competitors in the AI era.

A transaction defined by "thousands of times of return"

Schmidt's investment can hardly be measured by conventional VC return metrics on paper.

Data from PitchBook shows that Anthropic was valued at 461 million US dollars when Schmidt made his first investment. If the IPO valuation hits the target of around 2 trillion US dollars, it means Anthropic's valuation has increased by more than 4,300 times compared with the Series A round. For reference, according to public reports, Innovation Endeavors invested in Uber in the early stage in 2011, and by the time Uber went public in 2019, its valuation had increased by about 1,400 times — which was already one of the most successful early investments in Silicon Valley history. Schmidt's return multiple on Anthropic is several times that of the Uber deal.

Of course, paper wealth is not equal to cash. Even calculated based on the roughly 1.5 trillion US dollar valuation currently discussed by investors, this 1% stake will add about 150 billion US dollars to Schmidt's existing 57.5 billion US dollar net worth. If the IPO pricing can reach the target valuation of around 2 trillion US dollars, Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates that Schmidt's net worth will increase by about one third, approaching 800 billion US dollars.

For a "former CEO" who has stepped down from Google's daily operations for nearly eight years, the return on this investment is, to some extent, more financially dramatic than any strategic decision he made during his tenure at Google.

Schmidt's AI landscape: more than just Anthropic

If Schmidt's investment in Anthropic is regarded as an isolated bet, it will underestimate the depth of his layout in the AI track.

In the past few years, through platforms such as Hillspire, Schmidt has systematically built an investment portfolio covering the cross-cutting fields of AI infrastructure, foundation models and security. In addition to Anthropic, he has also invested in France's Mistral AI, Reflection AI, and World Labs founded by Li Feifei; earlier, he participated in the investment of SandboxAQ, a quantum + AI company spun off from Alphabet. Hillspire has invested in more than 20 AI companies since 2019, and AI has become one of the core directions of Schmidt's personal capital allocation.

Some analyses summarize Schmidt's AI investment philosophy as a perspective of "geopolitics and infrastructure arms race": he does not focus on the outbreak of a single application layer, but the long-term pattern of underlying resources and capabilities such as energy, computing power, and defense AI. Anthropic is exactly the most critical link in this logic — it is not only a leading player in cutting-edge foundation models, but also embedded in the world's largest cloud computing and chip supply chain due to its deep ties with Google and Amazon. In this sense, Schmidt's bet on Anthropic in 2021 is not so much "betting on a unicorn" as identifying a few foundation model companies that may define the next-generation computing platform in the early stage of the AI race, and taking a position in advance with personal capital.

The bell of IPO: both wealth creation and risks coexist

The reason why Schmidt's 1% stake has become news at this time is that Anthropic's IPO has entered the countdown.

According to people familiar with the matter, Anthropic plans to launch the official IPO marketing as early as the week of November 9, 2026, and is expected to start trading before the US Thanksgiving, and complete the listing by the end of the year at the latest. Its IPO scale is expected to match or even exceed the 1.77 trillion US dollar listing valuation record set by SpaceX in June 2026.

But this does not mean everything is going smoothly. In the same week when the news of Schmidt's shareholding broke out, Anthropic's valuation expectation had already seen a substantial downward revision. At the investor day in San Francisco, the valuation discussed by some investors was about 1.5 trillion US dollars, significantly lower than the previous target valuation of around 2 trillion US dollars. The direct trigger for the downward revision was the slowdown in growth: Anthropic's revenue in the third quarter of 2026 was 168 billion US dollars, with a quarter-on-quarter growth of 45%, while the second quarter of 2026 more than doubled compared with the first quarter. A 45% quarter-on-quarter growth rate is still amazing for the vast majority of companies, but compared with Anthropic's previously set growth curve and the public market's scrutiny standards for trillion-dollar valuations, it is no longer sufficient to fully support the original pricing narrative.

The deeper pressure comes from the questioning of its business model. According to the prospectus, Anthropic has promised to spend about 5.18 trillion US dollars on cloud computing, computing power and infrastructure-related contractual obligations in the next ten years, of which about 80% are non-cancellable. Its full-year revenue in 2025 was about 4.6 billion US dollars, after excluding non-cash accounting impacts such as changes in the fair value of convertible financing instruments, the operating-level loss still exceeded 80 billion US dollars, and the expenditure on computing power and infrastructure reached 73.3 billion US dollars. Anthropic has achieved adjusted profitability in the third quarter of 2026, but the market needs to judge whether this improvement can continue after the IPO and support a trillion-dollar valuation.

At the same time, OpenAI's moves are also squeezing Anthropic's pricing space. OpenAI has postponed its IPO and is pushing forward a new round of financing in the private market with a pre-money valuation of about 1.4 trillion US dollars. OpenAI's choice to stay in the private market is, to some extent, avoiding the immediate test of the public market, while Anthropic has no such option — its investors need to exit, and IPO is an exit that has already been scheduled.

Schmidt's position

Back to Schmidt himself. His role in this IPO is both a shrewd early investor and a special "outsider".

He did not promote the investment in Anthropic within Google's system — Google's support for Anthropic was completed through Alphabet's corporate investment. Schmidt used his own money, his own judgment, and his own time window. In 2021, when Anthropic was still a company valued at less than 500 million US dollars, he invested tens of millions of dollars, while the large model track was far from becoming a capital battlefield with such dense consensus as it is today.

If this investment is finally cashed out at a value of tens of billions of dollars, it will become one of the most extreme cases of personal early investment return in Silicon Valley history. But it also reminds the market of one thing: in the AI race, the biggest financial returns often do not belong to those who repeatedly preach their visions under the spotlight, but to those who place quiet bets with real money before the consensus is formed.

Schmidt is no longer in Google's office. But through that 1% stake in Anthropic, he still sits at the most core position at the AI poker table.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Tech Business", written by Tech Business, and authorized for release by 36Kr.