Exclusive | Gavin Newsoms AI insiders set for $250M payday from Anthropics blockbuster IPO
Gavin Newsom is hyping an artificial intelligence start up in California – and it could help his buddies and connections secure a colossal payday.Anthropic, the red-hot AI company best known for Claude, has filed to go public as early as October with a valuation of about $1 trillion.Newsom backers Omidyar Network, run by billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and the Ford Foundation, own roughly 250,000 Anthropic shares between them — a stake that could earn them $250 million to fund woke political causes when it goes public.Anthropic products are already used in a customer service tool for California’s Department of Tax and Fee Administration.And the firm is also involved in Newsom’s heavily promoted ”Engaged California” AI regulation push, with Claude crunching data collected by the state.
Left-wing megacharities Omidyar and Ford Foundation have quietly bankrolled Newsom and his wife’s pet causes, as the governor hands a collection of friendly nonprofits the keys to California’s AI rulebook.“It’s a progressive advocacy network working with a progressive politician and a company with a reputation for being fairly progressive in its social outlook — all working to set the rules for a frontier of the economy,” said Mike Lee of Capital Research, a watchdog group that tracks nonprofit money in politics. “Do you call it a conflict of interest, or ‘doing well by doing good’? It depends on what side you’re on,” Lee added. Anthropic filed confidentially for its upcoming IPO Monday and was last valued at $965 billion.Omidyar, Ford and fellow “impact investor” Nathan Cummings Foundation snapped up just under 250,000 shares of Anthropic in the FTX bankruptcy sale, ImpactAlpha reported.
In Washington, DC in May, Newsom championed an AI mass welfare plan, citing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s grim warnings about catastrophic job losses.He published an executive order on AI job disruption — the latest of several AI regulations.“[...