When Anthropic announced on Thursday that it had raised $65 billion at an eye-watering valuation of $965 billion, it didn’t just become the most valuable AI startup in the world, eclipsing $852 billion-valued archrival OpenAI. It also ballooned the individual fortunes of Anthropic’s seven cofounders — more than doubling their net worths to $16.6 billion apiece, Forbes estimates.

That’s still less than OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who testified during the company’s trial versus Elon Musk earlier this month that his stake in the startup is worth nearly $30 billion. But it’s more than the stake of OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who testified his cut of OpenAI is worth around $7 billion. And it’s of course larger than that of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who owns no direct stake in his company (though Forbes estimates him to be worth $3.5 billion from other investments).

That puts siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, as well as their five other cofounders Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Tom Brown and Jared Kaplan, in rarified air when it comes to entrepreneurs who struck it rich in the generative AI boom. Forbes estimates that Anthropic’s cofounders each own just over 1.7% of the company. An Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment on their stakes or net worths.

The new fundraise illustrates........

© Forbes