Will OpenAI’s Investor Terms Hurt Anthropic—or Help It?

It’s reasonable to ask that your VC backers not fund your greatest competitors. In the past, avoiding such rival investments was the norm! Still, OpenAI’s private request of its backers, that they avoid investing in other artificial intelligence model makers, stands out. Increasingly investors have been funding rival AI businesses as a way to hedge their bets. 

They’re likely to keep doing so, that is unless they’ve aligned themselves with OpenAI. It’s asked investors in its $6.6 billion round to no longer back Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI, AI search engine Perplexity and Safe Superintelligence Inc., the AI lab started by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, according to two people with direct knowledge of the request.

Investors aren’t contractually obliged, and there’s no punishment if they do invest in a competitor later on, one of the people said. It's also clear that not all OpenAI backers will do what they’re told. One investor who wrote a significant check in the $157 billion-valuation financing told me that OpenAI’s objection alone would not be enough to stop them from making an investment in a rival.