In 2023, as Dario Amodei was fundraising for the company’s $750 million Series D round, an investor was seated with the CEO at a dinner when he recalled him getting worked up in a conversation about safety issues around artificial intelligence.
“When he was talking about the risks of AI, he contorted,” says the investor. “His body twisted. He was really emotionally showing how scared he was.”
It made an impression on the investor, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of impact to their business, and said they believed large language models would never be successful if they weren’t trustworthy.
“I’m disappointed matters of national security implications are being aired in public,” says J.D. Russell, who runs the investment firm Alpha Funds, and holds a position in Anthropic. Russell said he respected Anthropic’s positions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, but said that “you have to be realistic that adversaries to the U.S. are pursuing those capabilities with far fewer constraints.”
Jacques Tohme, managing partner of the firm Amerocap, put simply that he “did not agree” with the position the company had taken.
One of those investors, Alberto Emprin, an investor who runs the firm 3LB Seed Capital, published his perspectives and support of Anthropic, in Italian, on Substack earlier this week, noting that Amodei, through his position, had become “a kind of champion of ethics in the AI era.”
“Amodei’s argument is, on the surface, unimpeachable: artificial intelligence is still imperfect, it makes mistakes, and the idea that due to a hallucination or a training bias the ‘wrong person’ could be killed is ethically intolerable,” Emprin wrote.
Finding consensus among Anthropic’s investors may not be easy, however. While not all investors have been pleased with the hardline stance that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has taken, there’s also a variety of views about how damaging the Pentagon spat could be for the company. The U.S. government contract was small, reportedly about $200 million, or roughly 1% of Anthropic’s annual revenue, according to Bloomberg.
Russell, the Alpha Funds manager, said he didn’t expect the Pentagon’s move to be “any real negative impact on them,” as it’s “really just one contract.”
Depending on how the supply chain risk designation is interpreted, however (Anthropic is widely expected to fight it in court), it could lead to broader fallout by forcing any company doing business with the DoD to stop using Anthropic products. Other federal agencies, including the State Department and Treasury Department, have also said they will no longer use Anthropic.
On the flip side, some Anthropic investors say they’re heartened by the surge in goodwill the company has reaped by standing firm on its principles. Patrick Hable, an investor who runs the firm 3 Comma Capital, said he believed the whole issue would be a “net positive” for the company. “Contracts lost but millions of supporters won,” he said. But he added that “Even if that would be a net negative, he [did] the right thing,” he said.
