To win the artificial Intelligentierace, Google has not only developed its own technologies, but has also pumped money into prominent AI startups. And to keep his competitive advantage, Google has kept his ownership interests in those startups a secret.
Judicial documents recently obtained by the New York Times reveal the importance of Google in one of those startups, anthropic, and how his investment in the young company will change.
Google owns 14 percent of anthropic, according to legal archives that the AI-start-up has submitted as part of a Google Antitrust case. But that investment gives Google little control over the company. According to the archives, the internet giant can only possess up to 15 percent of anthropic, and Google has no voting rights, no management seats and no rights of the administrative observer at the start-up.
Nevertheless, Google will invest an extra $ 750 million in anthropic in September by a kind of loan that is known as convertible debt, according to the archives. The companies agreed to the convertible memorandum in 2023. In total, Google has invested more than $ 3 billion in the AI company.
The archives offer a rare look in the investment of a large technology company in an AI start-up. Such investments were examined by regulators, who wondered whether the deals established operators gave an unfair advantage in the rapidly evolving and powerful technology. Apart from Google, Amazon and Microsoft have also invested in high-profile AI start-ups such as Anthropic and OpenAi, the creator of the Chatgpt-Chatbot.
“A large company such as Google knows that there is a race to AI, and it has a sufficiently large cash stack that can bet on several horses,” said Chris V. Nicholson, an investor at the Risk Capital Company Page One Ventures that focuses on AI technologies.
Anthropic archives emerged in a milestone Google Antitrust case during online search. In August, a federal court found that Google had succeeded as a monopolist when searching for the internet, whereby the law was violated.
To remedy the situation, the Ministry of Justice, that the case has established Google, had proposed that the court forces the Silicon Valley Company to sell AI products that can compete with searching. That could have included the importance of Google in Anthropic, so that a chatbot claude is called where people can turn for searches.
On Friday, the Ministry of Justice withdrew to that proposal and argued that Google should be obliged to only inform government officials before it makes investments in AI
Anthropic submitted the documents that were viewed by the times before the Ministry of Justice changed course. The archives on the public docket contain editors. Anthropic's law firm sent a non -drilled copy of his files to the Times, which has argued for more public access to the antitrust case.
In the non-reacted files, Anthropic said that Google should not be forced to repel his interest in the start-up. That “would harm both anthropic and competition more generally” by depressing the market value of the young company and hinder his ability to attract capital, the lawyers of Anthropic wrote.
Tom Brown, an anthropic co-founder, added that the start-up would 'suffer serious damage' if Google was forced to break their relationship, demonstrated the documents.
Google refused to comment on the financial conditions of his anthropic interest. It said that in a number of companies it had made stock investments to make a return and grow the market. Anthropic refused to comment.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela Amodei, who were opened open after disagreements about how the technologies were financed and released via Microsoft. They created anthropic to build AI with safety money rails, and the company structured as a public interest that is aimed at creating the public and socially good.
(The Times has sued OpenAi and Microsoft and accuses them of infringing the copyright of news content with regard to AI systems. OpenAi and Microsoft have denied those claims.)
Anthropic has worked to ensure that it is not owned or dominated by a single technical giant, according to the court applications. In total, the company has collected more than $ 14.8 billion from risk capital companies such as Menlo Ventures.
In 2023, Google invested more than $ 2 billion in anthropic. In the same year, Amazon invested $ 4 billion in anthropic, followed by an extra $ 4 billion last year.
Nowadays, Google's investment in Anthropic is worth a “considerable amount more” than the latest financing round of the start-up, which was concluded this month, according to the court applications. The financing appreciated anthropically at $ 61.5 billion.
Anthropic buys large amounts of computing power from Google and Amazon to build his AI systems and has been agreed to use chips and cloud computing services from some of the companies that have invested in it. That effectively means that part of the money collected is pumped back into its investors.
