The Financial Times reports that Demis Hassabis, the founder of Google's DeepMind, was an early angel investor in rival AI company Anthropic — a previously undisclosed stake that's sending shockwaves through the industry. Anthropic, one of the most valuable AI unicorns, just agreed to a new $30 billion funding round at a $900 billion valuation.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has long looked up to Hassabis as a role model. On the corporate side, Google has already invested billions in Anthropic as part of a cloud and AI strategic partnership.
This isn't the first time Hassabis has backed former colleagues. Since selling DeepMind to Google for £400 million in 2014, he's frequently invested personal capital in startups founded by ex-DeepMinders, including Inflection AI (co-founded by former DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman), Ineffable Intelligence (founded by longtime collaborator David Silver), and the UK startup incubator Entrepreneurs First.
Hassabis's angel investments are intertwined with a wave of departures from DeepMind, reflecting the complex power map of AI's golden generation. These top talents are both head-to-head business competitors and tightly connected through capital and networks.
Data shows that since 2021, former DeepMind researchers have founded over a dozen AI companies, raising at least $14 billion collectively. Notable examples include drug discovery firm Isomorphic Labs and Silver's Ineffable Intelligence — which alone raised over $3 billion in the past month. DeepMind alumni are also active at Mistral AI, legal AI unicorn Harvey, and novel materials search engine Cusp.ai.
Meanwhile, DeepMind's top executives are taking over Google's AI operations. Last year, CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu was promoted to Google's chief AI architect; last month, AlphaFold lead Pushmeet Kohli became chief scientist at Google Cloud.
Despite Hassabis's peak influence inside Google, DeepMind still refuses to relocate to Silicon Valley, remaining in London's King's Cross, where it's anchored a vast European AI innovation cluster.