With OpenAI on the verge of closing a new $100 billion round and Anthropic just closing its own monster $30 billion raise, one thing is clear: The concept of investor “loyalty” is hanging by a thread.
At least a dozen direct investors in OpenAI were was announced as backers of Anthropic’s $30 billion raise earlier this month, including Founders Fund, Iconiq, Insight Partners and Sequoia Capital.
Some dual investing is understandable if you come from the hedge fund or asset manager world, where their focus is still largely on investing in public stocks (competitors or not). These include D1, Fidelity and TPG.
One of them was a little shocking. Related BlackRock funds participated in Anthropic’s $30 billion raise, even though BlackRock senior managing director and board member Adebayo Ogunlesi is also on OpenAI’s board.
In this world, it is true that if various BlackRock funds have the opportunity to own OpenAI stock, they are likely to take it, never mind the personal association of a member of their senior leadership. (BlackRock manages every type of mutual fund, including mutual funds, closed-end funds and ETFs). And we all know the history of the OpenAI and Microsoft relationship and why Microsoft is hedging its bets. Same for Nvidia.
But venture capital funds—until now—worked differently.
VCs market themselves as “founder-friendly” and “helpful,” the idea being that when a VC firm buys a piece of a startup’s company, the investor will help that startup succeed, particularly against its larger rivals. If you own both OpenAI and Anthropic, who do you have faith in, other than your own investors?
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Moreover, startups are private companies. They typically share confidential information with their direct investors about their business situation — data that is not publicly disclosed as is the case with public companies. In many cases, VCs also hold board positions, which brings another layer of fiduciary responsibility to their portfolio companies.
What makes this case even more interesting is that Sam Altman comes from the world of venture capital, as the former president of Y Combinator. He knows the drill. In 2024, he reportedly gave his investors a list of OpenAI adversaries; that he did not want them to back down. It largely included companies created by people who left OpenAI, including Anthropic, xAI, and Safe Superintelligence.
Altman later denied telling OpenAI investors they would be barred from future rounds if they backed his list of opponents. Altman admitted to saying that if they “make non-passive investments,” they would no longer receive OpenAI’s confidential business information, according to documents in the lawsuit between Elon Musk and OpenAI. reported Business Insider.
AI is also breaking the mold with record amounts of money being raised by the biggest AI labs as they experience unprecedented growth (and unprecedented data center needs). At some point, when the hat is out there, the needs are so great and the potential for returns so great, who would expect anyone to say no?
It turns out that not all venture capitalists have slipped up yet. Andreessen Horowitz supports OpenAI but not (yet) Anthropic. Menlo Ventures backs Anthropic but not (yet) OpenAI, for example.
In fact, in our admittedly non-exhaustive research, we found a dozen investors who appear to have direct investments in only one of these companies, not both.
Others are Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst and Greenoaks. (Note: We originally asked Claude to give us the list of double investors. There were almost as many wrong entries as correct entries, so all for a very good tech, whose work sometimes remains less reliable than that of an intern.)
However, as we mentioned earlier, it’s notable that this long-standing rule has been rejected by some of the most respected companies in the Valley, such as Sequoia. One investor we approached just shrugged and said that as long as the company doesn’t have a board seat, no one sees the harm in it anymore.
However, conflict of interest policies should now become another thing founders ask about before signing that term sheet, no matter who it is.
