Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's 1% Anthropic Stake Poised to Reach Tens of Billions USD Valuation Pre-IPO

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's 1% Anthropic Stake Poised to Reach Tens of Billions USD Valuation Pre-IPO In the power games of Silicon Valley, few people understand the art of "positioning" better than Eric Schmidt. The 71-year-old former CEO of Google led the company from 2001 to 2011, and later served as Executive Chairman of parent company Alphabet until 2018. He experienced the golden age of search advertising and witnessed Google's expansion from a search engine startup into a global tech giant. What makes Schmidt truly remarkable, however, is how he continued to participate in the AI race with capital after leaving Google's power center. On October 19, 2026, Bloomberg cited people familiar with the matter reporting that Schmidt holds about 1% of the shares in Anthropic, a stake that originated from his tens of millions of dollars of investment in the Series A round in 2021. At that time, Anthropic was valued at only 461 million US dollars. Now as Anthropic is about to launch its IPO, the valuation discussed by investors has been revised down from the previous target of around 2 trillion US dollars to roughly 1.5 trillion US dollars. Even calculated based on the 1.5 trillion US dollar valuation, the 1% stake in Schmidt's hands is worth nearly 15 billion US dollars; if the IPO pricing can approach the previous target valuation of about 2 trillion US dollars again, the value of this stake will reach around 200 billion US dollars. It is currently unclear whether he has sold any shares in subsequent rounds, and both Schmidt's side and Anthropic have refused to comment. A noteworthy detail is that Schmidt is Google's former CEO, and Google happens to be one of Anthropic's biggest supporters.