Demis Hassabis, chief executive officer of Google DeepMind, was found to have participated as an early investor in Anthropic.
Hassabis said he joined as an angel investor in Anthropic in its early days, the Financial Times (FT) reported on the 19th local time. Anthropic has emerged in recent years as a major competitor to Google in the AI market. Google also invested $3 billion in Anthropic early on, and recently said it would invest up to an additional $40 billion.
FT said Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei regards Hassabis as a role model. Anthropic quickly secured corporate clients by promoting Claude Code, the coding tool for its AI model Claude, and recently shook the security market by unveiling "Mythos," which excels at finding security vulnerabilities. Preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) this year, Anthropic is discussing new funding based on a valuation of about $900 billion (about 1,336 trillion won).
News of this investment came alongside word that researchers from DeepMind have founded more than a dozen startups since 2021 and raised at least $14 billion (about 19 trillion won). Among these corporations are the U.K. AI corporation Isomorphic Labs and Ineffable Intelligence. The two companies raised more than $3 billion just last month.
After selling DeepMind to Google for about £400 million, Hassabis has taken part as an angel investor in startups founded by former colleagues. Representative examples include Inflection AI, founded by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman before joining Microsoft (MS) in 2024, and Ineffable Intelligence, founded by David Silver, a long-time friend and collaborator.
FT said, "This shows that Hassabis is expanding influence across the AI industry."
Other startups founded by former Google DeepMind employees include Mistral, Harvey, AMI Labs, Recursive Superintelligence, Latent Apps, Reflection AI, Cursive AI, and Orbital Materials.