Anthropic is planning to seek investment from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, according to a Slack message CEO Dario Amodei sent to staff Sunday morning, which WIRED obtained.
Weighing the pros and cons, Amodei acknowledged in his note that accepting money from Middle East leaders would likely enrich “dictators.” “This is a real downside and I’m not thrilled about it,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.”
The message comes as AI companies race to secure the massive amounts of capital required to train and develop frontier AI models. In January, OpenAI announced a $500 billion data center project called Stargate with financial backing from MGX, a state-owned Emirati investment firm. Four months later, the company announced it was planning to build a data center in Abu Dhabi, as part of a push to help foreign governments “build sovereign AI capability in coordination with the US.”
“As an American company at the frontier of AI development, we have always believed the supply chain of frontier AI model development should be on American soil in order to maintain America’s lead,” said Anthropic spokesperson Christopher Nulty in a statement. “As Dario has said before, we believe fundamentally in sharing the benefits of AI and serve the Middle East and regions around the world commercially, in line with our Usage Policy.”
In May, President Donald Trump toured the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia as part of a four-day trip focused on economic investments. A cabal of tech leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang, joined him for a meeting with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Anthropic’s leadership was notably absent.
In his memo, Amodei acknowledged that the decision to pursue investments from authoritarian regimes would lead to accusations of hypocrisy. In an essay titled “Machines of Loving Grace,” Amodei wrote: “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.”
In 2024, Anthropic decided not to accept money from Saudi Arabia, citing national security concerns, per CNBC. The news came as FTX, the failed cryptocurrency exchange, went into bankruptcy proceedings, and its nearly 8 percent stake in Anthropic went up for sale. Ultimately, a majority of those shares went to ATIC Third International Investment, a UAE firm. At the time, the stake was worth about $500 million.
Now, it appears Anthropic is poised to accept Gulf State money—though the company hasn’t said whether it has changed its stance on Saudi Arabia in particular. “There is a truly giant amount of capital in the Middle East, easily $100B or more,” Amodei wrote in the memo. “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.”