Anthropic Acquired By FTX Estate For $884 Million, With Bulk Moving To UAE

(CTN News) – Anthropic’s stake in FTX, a bankrupt crypto exchange, has been sold for $884 million to a consortium of buyers, according to a filing submitted late Friday.

There are a number of potential buyers listed in the document, dated March 22, including Mubadala, a sovereign wealth fund in the United Arab Emirates, which holds the largest stake. That group will purchase $500 million worth of Anthropic shares.

According to reports, several sovereign wealth funds were interested in FTX’s Anthropic stake. Saudi Arabia was specifically ruled out due to national security concerns, sources told CNBC on Friday. To diversify away from oil and capture talent from the UAE, the kingdom has invested billions of dollars into tech investment funds.

Anthropic’s second biggest buyer is Jane Street, where Sam Bankman-Fried worked before starting his own company. Also formerly employed at Jane Street is Caroline Ellison, ex-CEO of FTX’s sister hedge fund Alameda Research. The firm will purchase $100 million worth of shares.

Craig Falls, Jane Street’s head of quantitative research, has also proposed purchasing shares worth $20 million personally.

Nearly two dozen other buyers include the HOF Capital Venture Fund, the Ford Foundation, and Fidelity Management funds.

There is still a long way to go before the sales are final. They must be approved by Judge John Dorsey, who oversees FTX’s bankruptcy case. Assuming the sale is approved, nearly two thirds of FTX’s Anthropic stake would be sold off.

As a result of FTX’s collapse, Bankman-Fried was convicted of seven criminal counts in November. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Thursday, and prosecutors recommend a sentence between 40 and 50 years.

Before the boom in generative AI, Bankman-Fried led FTX to invest $500 million in Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees. FTX’s roughly 8% stake would be worth about $1.4 billion at $18 billion, according to FTX’s December 2023 valuation.

As part of its attempts to pay back clients who lost money when FTX collapsed in late 2022, the bankruptcy estate has been looking to sell its shares in Anthropic. Amazon and Alphabet have contributed $7 billion to Anthropic in recent years. It has taken less than 10 months for rival OpenAI’s valuation to triple to $80 billion.

In the past few months, FTX has reclaimed cash, luxury properties, cryptocurrency, and located missing assets under new CEO John Ray III.

In addition to the $700 million given to K5 Global and founder Michael Kives, who invested FTX cash in companies like SpaceX, his team has already collected more than $7 billion. There has been a precipitous rise in the value of some of those investments.

Earlier this month, bankruptcy estate lawyers told a Delaware judge they expect to fully reimburse customers and creditors. Andrew Dietderich, who works with FTX’s new leadership team, said “there is still a great deal of work and risk” to get all the money back to clients, but the team has a “strategy to accomplish it.”

As of January, FTX had been negotiating with bidders about a potential reboot.

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