FTX Looking to Sell Shares in Anthropic Amid AI Boom: Semafor

Crypto Breaking News

Jun 6

FTX may be looking to offload its stake in OpenAI rival Anthropic, according to a report by Semafor.

The publication said the cryptocurrency exchange currently holds over $500 million worth of shares in Anthropic, pointing to a November 2022 report by the Financial Times.

Citing people familiar with the matter, Semafor says Perella Weinberg, the bank handling the potential sale of the shares, has been floating the idea to investors.

According to the spreadsheet published by the Financial Times, FTX also invested $43 million in Twitter.

FTX and Weinberg declined to comment.

Since the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November, artificial intelligence, specifically generative AI, has taken the world by storm. Technology giants Microsoft and Google have invested billions to bring the technology to the masses. Microsoft reportedly invested $13 billion in OpenAI and integrating ChatGPT into its Bing web browser.

Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence trained on vast amounts of data and can produce content based on these prompts. The technology still struggles with what the industry calls "hallucinations," or creating false information as fact in its responses.

Launched in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, Anthropic launched Claude AI in March after receiving a $400 million investment from Google earlier this year. In May, Anthropic raised another $450 million in Series C funding led by Spark Capital. That same month, Anthropic announced an advancement in Claude AI that would allow the chatbot to process over 100,000 tokens or 75,000 words.

"The average person can read 100,000 tokens of text in five-plus hours, and then they might need substantially longer to digest, remember, and analyze that information. Claude can now do this in less than a minute," the company said.

FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in November. A month later, FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was charged with money laundering, fraud, and conspiracy to commit wire.

In January, a federal judge overseeing the FTX bankruptcy permitted the failed exchange to sell off some of its assets to repay creditors. Weinberg is discussing whether it would sell FTX's entire position in Anthropic, Semafor said.

FTX sold the derivates trading platform, LedgerX, to private equity firm M7 Holdings after receiving court approval in May.