Eric Schmidt's 1% Anthropic Stake Could Hit $20 Billion at IPO

Eric Schmidt's 1% stake in Anthropic could be worth as much as $20 billion if the AI lab goes public at its $2 trillion target — a windfall that traces back to an introduction from his ex-girlfriend, who is now married to Anthropic's co-founder.

People familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Schmidt owns 1% of Anthropic, which is preparing an IPO that could come as soon as next month. That stake's potential value rests entirely on the company hitting its lofty target price. Fortune's request for comment went unanswered by Anthropic, and a spokesperson for Schmidt declined to comment on the record.

How Schmidt got in the door

The Wall Street Journal reported that Schmidt's path to Anthropic ran through Cami Clark. Schmidt dated Clark for three years starting in 2011; she began dating Dario Amodei in 2014 and later married him. Clark introduced Schmidt to Amodei, and Schmidt visited the couple's apartment in 2018 — three years before Amodei co-founded Anthropic.

The connection paid off. Schmidt joined Anthropic's earliest investors in its $124 million Series A round in 2021, with sources telling Bloomberg his investment was in the tens of millions. He bought in when Anthropic was valued at $461 million, according to PitchBook data. Five years later, after its May 28 funding round, the company is valued at $965 billion. At a $2 trillion IPO, Anthropic would be worth more than 4,300 times its 2021 valuation.

What do Anthropic's financials actually show?

The revenue numbers are staggering. Anthropic generated $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of this year, up from $1.1 billion in the same period a year earlier, according to its S-1 reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. That's roughly a fifteenfold jump.

The loss line is staggering too. Anthropic reported an $80.7 billion loss in the first half — but $72 billion of that came from an accounting charge tied to the rising value of its convertible debt and financing instruments, not cash burn.

The real cash story is compute. Anthropic spent $9 billion on compute infrastructure in the first half, up from $2.3 billion a year earlier, and more than its entire 2025 compute spend of $7.3 billion, per the Journal's S-1 reporting. It has also signed $450 billion in mostly "noncancellable" cloud computing deals over the next decade — about $45 billion a year locked in regardless of what revenue does.

Can a $2 trillion valuation hold?

An early Anthropic investor told Fortune's Shawn Tully that the shares could trade at $2.4 trillion post-IPO, surpassing SpaceX's $2.1 trillion market cap at the close of its first trading day in June.

But the math is demanding. Fortune previously reported Anthropic would need annual profits of $59 billion to $79 billion to justify a $2 trillion IPO. The S-1 itself flags two risks: a narrow customer base and uncertainty about securing enough compute. The Journal reported Anthropic is seeking more capacity than its large cloud partners — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google — can currently provide.

For Schmidt and the other Series A names, none of that changes the immediate arithmetic. A stake bought at a $461 million valuation, in the tens of millions of dollars, is positioned to return eight figures of multiples if the IPO prices anywhere near target. The question the rest of the market has to answer is whether Anthropic's revenue growth can outrun a compute bill that nearly quadrupled in a single year.