Court documents show Google is heavily invested in AI startup Anthropic

Among the bigger names in the world of Big Tech, Google reigns supreme in almost all ways globally. It has a laundry list of products on both the hardware and software side, with Google I/O 2025 set to showcase some of its latest innovations with Android 16, Android XR, and, of course, Gemini. Artificial intelligence became the public focus of Google’s product synergy just over a year ago, and Gemini has a lot of useful features across the entire landscape of Google’s app library (some of which we didn’t realize until recently). For Google to continue running the AI gauntlet at the highest level its executives can dictate, it has invested in many startup AI companies, but it’s typically kept its involvement in said startups quiet. You can’t fool cold hard courts, though.

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First reported on by The New York Times, court filings show that Google’s investment in Anthropic has grown to it owning 14% of the company (via The Verge). Within those legal filings, it also reveals that Google legally cannot own more than 15% of the startup and has no voting rights on company decisions. Additionally, Google cannot place anyone on the Anthropic board and has no observer rights. Financial Times reported in January that Google had invested $3 billion in the company already (Amazon had already invested $8 billion by that point). The NYT report shows that Google plans to invest another $750 million in September with what is called a convertible debt loan, something that was agreed upon in 2023.

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While the big players like Google and OpenAI are constantly in the midst of battling for AI user base supremacy, other AI startups are starting to steal some of the limelight. Anthropic was launched after 11 former OpenAI employees left the company in 2021, and its chatbot, Claude, has seen a lot of positive feedback. As previously mentioned, it has received billions of dollars in investments from much-larger companies, leading to its market credibility. There are other less-used AI chatbots and assistants, such as Mistral, You.com, and Chatsonic. You can’t forget about other big names in the tech world, too, such as Microsoft with Copilot and Apple with Apple Intelligence. On second thought, let’s forget about Apple Intelligence.

Perhaps there is no better AI startup to talk about than DeepSeek AI, which desperately upset the status quo globally by sharply reducing the cost to train its LLM versus the big names’ products in Gemini and ChatGPT. It’s practically just as advanced for a fraction of the cost, and in response, the Nasdaq index lost $1 trillion in market capitalization in the days that followed. Nvidia lost almost $600 billion. DeepSeek AI does a lot of things better than Gemini does, which is extremely impressive and spotlights a small amount of doubt about Google’s potential AI arms race domination.