Anthropic to Seek Gulf state Investments

Anthropic will seek Gulf state investments, according to a leaked memo from CEO Dario Amodei.

The 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. 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.”

“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 obje

ctionable. I really wish we weren't in this position, but we are.”