Google Quietly Acquired 14 Percent of Anthropic

Court documents obtained by The New York Times show that Google quietly acquired a 14 percent stake in Anthropic in deals with a total value of over $3 billion. The online giant plans to invest an additional $750 million or so in September to bring its investment up to the 15 percent maximum ownership stake that Anthropic secretly agreed to in 2023.

As with Microsoft’s $14 billion in total investments in OpenAI, Google doesn’t have much control over Anthropic. It has no voting rights, no board seats, and no observer on the board. But Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown said his company would “suffer grievous harm” if Google was forced to sever its relationships with AI startups.

Not coincidentally, Google’s secret investments in Anthropic were disclosed as part of U.S. v. Google. In that case, the online giant was found to have illegally abused its monopoly in online search in part by–ironically–secretly paying Apple over $20 billion each year to be the default search engine on the iPhone.

How one of the world’s biggest corporations can keep making multi-billion-dollar deals like this without disclosing them to investors or regulators is unclear. But it’s just another example of a troubling trend in which Big Tech firms are trying to bypass antitrust regulations by finding creative ways to partner with AI firms they would otherwise simply acquire.

Google has not commented on the disclosure, but its perhaps worth pointing out that the company hasn’t been shy about criticizing Microsoft for relying on outside AI. Now it appears that Google is engaging in the same behavior, or at least trying to.