Anthropic CEO in leaked memo to employees on planning to seek investment in UAE and Qatar: ‘I really wish we weren't in this position, but we are'

Time of India

5 days ago

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
has sent a memo to its employees informing about the company's plan to seek investment from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. According to a Wired report, Amodei sent the memo via Slack where he admitted that taking money from Gulf states has ethical risks—but said the company needs the capital to stay competitive. 'I really wish we weren't in this position, but we are,' Amodei wrote.
In the memo, Dario Amodei acknowledged that this decision could help enrich authoritarian regimes. 'This is a real downside and I'm not thrilled about it,' he wrote. 'Unfortunately, I think 'No bad person should ever benefit from our success' is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.'
In May this year, US President
Donald Trump
visited the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The four-day tour was focused on boosting economic ties. Trump was accompanied by tech CEOs that included Tesla CEO
Elon Musk
, OpenAI CEO
Sam Altman
and Nvidia CEO
Jensen Huang
.
The CEO said Anthropic will pursue a 'narrowly scoped, purely financial investment from Gulf countries' to avoid giving them leverage over company decisions. However, he warned even this limited approach carries risk.
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'The implicit promise of investing in future rounds can create a situation where they have some soft power, making it a bit harder to resist these things in the future,' Amodei said. 'In fact, I actually am worried that getting the largest possible amounts of investment might be difficult without agreeing to some of these other things.'
'But I think the right response to this is simply to see how much we can get without agreeing to these things… and then hold firm if they ask,' he added.
Anthropic's past position on Middle East funding
Anthropic
had previously avoided funding from authoritarian governments. In 2024, the AI company declined to take money from Saudi Arabia due to national security concerns, as reported by CNBC. But it later accepted a stake buyout worth about $500 million by a UAE firm during FTX's bankruptcy sale.
Now, the company appears to be opening up more directly to Gulf investment. 'There is a truly giant amount of capital in the Middle East, easily $100B or more,' Dario Amodei wrote. 'If we want to stay on the frontier, we gain a very large benefit from having access to this capital.'
In the memo, Amodei reiterated the risks of locating powerful AI infrastructure in authoritarian countries. 'The basis of our opposition to large training clusters in the Middle East, or to shipping H20's to China, is that the 'supply chain' of AI is dangerous to hand to authoritarian governments,' he said.
'Since AI is likely to be the most powerful technology in the world, these governments can use it to gain military dominance or to gain leverage over democratic countries,' he added
The CEO noted a broader trend of tech companies becoming more comfortable with partnerships in the Gulf. 'Without a central authority blocking them, there's a race to the bottom where companies gain a lot of advantage by getting deeper and deeper in bed with the Middle East,' he wrote.
'Unfortunately, having failed to prevent that dynamic at the collective level, we're now stuck with it as an individual company,' Amodei added.
In the memo, Amodei predicted the company would face public backlash. 'The media / Twitter / the outside world is always looking for hypocrisy, while also being very stupid and therefore having a poor understanding of substantive issues,' he wrote.
He defended the decision by saying it's consistent with how real-world policy works. 'It's perfectly consistent to advocate for a policy of 'No one is allowed to do x,' but then if that policy fails and everyone else does X, to reluctantly do x ourselves,' he explained.
Amodei said Anthropic remains committed to not building data centers in the region and to enforcing its use policies. 'We are also interested in serving the region commercially, which is something I think is actually pure positive,' he said. 'In fact, it could have important benefits for the world including improving human health, aiding economic development, etc.'
'As with many decisions, this one has downsides,' Amodei concluded, 'but we believe it's the right one overall.'
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