With AI, investor loyalty is (almost) dead: At least a dozen OpenAI VCs now also back Anthropic

With OpenAI about to close a new $100 billion round and Anthropic just closed its own monster $30 billion raise, one thing is clear: the concept of investor “loyalty” is only hanging in the balance.

At least a dozen direct investors in OpenAI were announced as backers of Anthropic’s $30 billion raise earlier this month, including Founders Fund, Iconiq, Insight Partners and Sequoia Capital.

Some dual investing is understandable if you come from the hedge fund or asset manager world, where your focus is still largely investing in public stocks (competing or not). These include D1, Fidelity and TPG.

One of them was a bit shocking. BlackRock affiliated funds joined Anthropic’s $30 billion raise even though BlackRock senior managing director and board member Adebayo Ogunlesi also sits on OpenAI’s board.

In that world, it’s true that if multiple BlackRock funds get the opportunity to own OpenAI stock, they’re likely to jump on it, regardless of the personal association of a member of their senior leadership. (BlackRock manages all types of funds, including mutual funds, closed-end funds, and ETFs.) And we all know the history of OpenAI and Microsoft’s relationship and why Microsoft is hedging its bets. The same goes for Nvidia.

But venture capital funds have, until now, operated differently.

Venture capitalists market themselves as “founder-friendly” and “helpful,” with the idea that when a venture capital firm buys a stake in a startup’s company, the investor will help that startup succeed, particularly against its biggest rivals. If you own OpenAI and Anthropic, who does your loyalty belong to, besides your own investors?

Furthermore, startups are private companies. They typically share confidential information with their direct investors about the state of their business, data that is not publicly disclosed as is the case with public companies. In many cases, venture capitalists also serve on boards of directors, which brings another level of fiduciary responsibility for their portfolio companies.

What makes this particular case even more interesting is that Sam Altman comes from the world of venture capital, as the former president of Y Combinator. He knows the procedure. In 2024, he allegedly gave his investors a list of OpenAI’s rivals I didn’t want them to go back. It largely included companies launched by people who left OpenAI, including Anthropic, xAI, and Safe Superintelligence.

Altman later denied telling OpenAI investors that they would be barred from future rounds if they backed his list of supposed rivals. Altman admitted that if they “made non-passive investments,” they would no longer receive confidential business information from OpenAI, according to documents in the lawsuit between Elon Musk and OpenAI. Business Insider reported.

AI is also breaking the mold due to the record amounts of money the largest AI labs are raising as they experience never-before-seen growth (and never-before-seen data center needs). At some point, when the hat is passed, the needs are so great and the chances of return are so great, who can be expected to say no?

It turns out that not all venture investors have fallen down the slippery slope yet. Andreessen Horowitz supports OpenAI but not (yet) Anthropic. Menlo Ventures backs Anthropic but not (yet) OpenAI, for example.

In fact, in our admittedly not exhaustive research, we found a dozen investors who appear to only have direct investments in one of these companies, not both.

Others include Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst and Greenoaks. (Note: We originally asked Claude to give us the list of dual investors. He got almost as many entries wrong as he got right, so all this for a cool tech whose work is still sometimes less reliable than that of an intern.)

Still, as we previously reported, it’s notable that this long-standing rule has been scrapped by some of the Valley’s most respected companies, like Sequoia. One investor we contacted simply shrugged and said that as long as the company doesn’t have a board seat, no one will see the damage that comes with it anymore.

Still, conflict of interest policies should now become another thing founders ask about before signing that term sheet, no matter whose it is.