Contrasts previous statements made by CEO Dario Amodei
Anthropic will seek Gulf state investments, according to a leaked memo from CEO Dario Amodei.
As reported by Wired, a leaked Slack message sent by Amodei to company staff on July 20 stated: “There is a truly giant amount of capital in the Middle East, easily $100B or more.
“If we want to stay on the frontier, we gain a very large benefit from having access to this capital. Without it, it is substantially harder to stay on the frontier.”
Amodei wrote that this would enrich “dictators,” but that “unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.”
Anthropic has previously accepted money from entities associated with Gulf states. In March 2024, cryptocurrency exchange FTX’s eight percent stake in Anthropic was up for sale as part of bankruptcy proceedings. Around two-thirds of that stake, worth $884m at the time, was majority acquired by a mix of buyers, including ATIC Third International Investment Co, a UAE-owned private equity firm.
At the time, Anthropic executives had ruled out an investment from Saudi Arabia on the basis of national security.
But the memo chafes against previous public statements made by Amodei. In ‘Machines of Loving Grace,’ an essay penned by the CEO in October 2024, he wrote that “AI-powered authoritarianism seems too terrible to contemplate, so democracies need to be able to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world, both to avoid being overpowered by authoritarians and to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian countries.”
Seemingly pre-empting potential criticism, a section titled “Erosion of Standards” stated that Anthropic's stance to the Middle East was rooted in concern about exporting the digital supply chain rather than receiving, and had “vociferously pushed for not allowing big data centers in the Middle East” because “without a central authority blocking them, there’s a race to the bottom where companies gain a lot of advantage by getting deeper and deeper in bed with the Middle East.
“Unfortunately, having failed to prevent that dynamic at the collective level, we're now stuck with it as an individual company, and the median position across the other companies appears to be ‘outsourcing our largest 5GW training runs to UAE/Saudi is fine.’ That puts us at a significant disadvantage, and we need to look for ways to make up some of that disadvantage while remaining less objectionable. I really wish we weren't in this position, but we are.”
This ‘position’ refers to Anthropic’s notable absence from the sudden inflow of American investment into Middle Eastern digital infrastructure following President Trump’s trip to the region in May of this year.
UAE Stargate, announced in the same month, will see OpenAI collaborate with Emirati AI company G42 to offer 5GW of compute capacity. Humain, the AI company owned by the Saudi Arabian government, said that it would buy 18,000 Nvidia GB300 chips with "several hundred thousand" more on the way, that it was partnering with AWS for a $5bn 'AI Zone,' had signed a deal with AMD for 500MW of compute, and deployed Groq chips for inference.
The Anthropic CEO did state that Gulf investment would be “narrowly scoped” and “purely financial,” in order to avoid investors gaining “leverage” over the company.
He continued by saying: “The basis of our opposition to large training clusters in the Middle East, or to shipping H20s to China, is that the ‘supply chain’ of Al is dangerous to hand to authoritarian governments—since Al is likely to be the most powerful technology in the world, these governments can use it to gain military dominance or to gain leverage over democratic countries.”
But he did admit that “getting the largest possible amounts of investment might be difficult without agreeing to some of these other things,” and that the “right response to this is simply to see how much we can get without agreeing to these things (which I think are likely still many billions), and then hold firm if they ask.”
In March of this year, Google was forced to reveal that it owned 14 percent of the AI business, which was valued in that same month at $61.5bn.
DCD has reached out to Anthropic for comment.
Update: Anthropic's statement reads: “As an American company at the frontier of AI development, we have always believed the supply chain of frontier AI model development should be on American soil in order to maintain America’s lead. As Dario has said before, we believe fundamentally in sharing the benefits of AI and serve the Middle East and regions around the world commercially, in line with our Usage Policy.
