Anthropic is reportedly in talks to raise $750 million from Menlo Ventures, which values the startup at $15 billion, according to The Information. Like OpenAI, Anthropic also has a complicated board structure with misaligned values, and this recent influx of cash begs the question: is Anthropic bound to be the next AI board showdown?
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Menlo Venture’s funding, which is yet to be finalized, would add to Google and Amazon’s $6 billion dollar investment in Dario Amodei’s Anthropic, which includes the cloud resources he so desperately needs. Amodei defected from OpenAI in 2021 to start his own AI company because of worries that Sam Altman was moving too quickly to commercialize. Anthropic’s premier chatbot Claude ranks just behind OpenAI’s GPT in terms of technical ability, and both are followed by the French Mistral AI, according to Hugging Face’s Leaderboard. However, Anthropic has since grown into one of the richest AI startups in the Valley, and Amodei could face the same pressure to commercialize that caused him to leave OpenAI.
That being said, Anthropic’s Board structure is arguably more complicated than OpenAI’s. Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela, run the daily operations, and report to Anthropic’s Board of Directors. That’s standard, but certain members of the Board are chosen by a group of five “financially disinterested members” that Anthropic calls the Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT). That group is made up of experts in AI safety and public policy who are largely CEOs of advocacy groups. The five LTBT members supposedly have no stake in the financial success of Anthropic, but they decide key board seats about who controls the company. While the LTBT themselves cannot fire a CEO or President, they certainly could choose Board members who align with their values.
Anthropic can make its board structure as complicated as it wants – the problems that OpenAI faced in November will still haunt any AI company. Major investors like Menlo Ventures, famous for early bets on Uber, Roku, and Siri, want to see commercial products sooner rather than later. If you’re getting funded by capitalists like Menlo, Google, and Amazon, you likely will be held to their standards: ship products fast. In a space as competitive as AI, the pressure can’t be underestimated.
It’s important to note that OpenAI also started with a mission of safety above all else. However, the more entwined they’ve become with Microsoft, the blurrier that vision is. Virtuous goals are hard to hold up against investors who have pledged billions, and those conflicts will likely come up as Anthropic ships better products.