Eric Schmidt’s path to a $20 billion Anthropic windfall began with an introduction from his ex, Cami Clark—now Dario Amodei’s wife

Eric Schmidt’s best AI bet may trace back to a very Silicon Valley kind of favor: staying on decent terms with an ex. Bloomberg reports the former Google CEO owns about 1% of Anthropic, a stake that could be worth as much as $20 billion if the company lists at its $2 trillion target.

That path ran through Cami Clark. She dated Schmidt for three years starting in 2011, then began dating Dario Amodei in 2014 and later married him. According to The Wall Street Journal, Clark introduced Schmidt to Amodei, and Schmidt visited the couple’s apartment in 2018, three years before Amodei co-founded Anthropic.

Schmidt later joined Anthropic’s early backers in the company’s $124 million Series A round in 2021. Bloomberg’s sources said his investment was in the tens of millions. At the time, Anthropic was valued at $461 million, according to PitchBook. After its May 28 funding round, that figure had climbed to $965 billion, which would make a $2 trillion IPO more than 4,300 times its 2021 valuation.

The money, though, comes wrapped in the usual AI-era headache: giant losses and bigger assumptions. Anthropic’s S-1, as reviewed by the Journal, showed $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of this year, up from $1.1 billion a year earlier, alongside an $80.7 billion loss. Most of that loss was an accounting charge tied to convertible debt and financing instruments, but the company still spent $9 billion on compute in that stretch and has signed $450 billion in mostly noncancellable cloud deals over the next decade.

That leaves a simple question under all the champagne: can Anthropic ever make enough money to support a $2 trillion price tag? The filing suggests it would need annual profits of $59 billion to $79 billion to justify that number. And it’s still hunting for more compute than Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google can apparently provide.