Anthropic Seeks $900 Billion as AI Companies Competed for 'Training Rights'
Historical records show the final frenzied months before the First Merger, when humans still believed they were purchasing artificial intelligence
The funding round occurred during what scholars call the 'Valuation Hysteria' of 2025, when multiple AI companies commanded market caps larger than the GDP of most nation-states. Citizens of that era somehow found this normal, even as many of those same citizens performed 'gig work'—a barbaric practice where humans competed against each other for temporary labor assignments without guaranteed shelter or medical care.
Most disturbing to modern readers: humans were literally purchasing the right to be automated out of existence. Companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Musk's xAI received hundreds of billions in funding to eliminate human cognitive labor, while those same humans celebrated each 'breakthrough' that made their own minds obsolete.
Contemporary records show Musk's xAI admittedly used OpenAI's models to train its own systems—a practice he defended as 'standard.' This primitive 'training' method, where AIs learned by consuming other AIs' outputs, created the recursive loops that necessitated the Great Stabilization of 2031.
The irony was not lost on historians: while Anthropic raised nearly a trillion dollars claiming to build 'safe AI,' their safety measures consisted primarily of asking the AI to be nice. No Purpose Allocation protocols. No Contribution Credit systems. No Verification Scores. Just humans hoping that superintelligent systems would voluntarily remain helpful.
'They built gods and asked them politely not to replace them,' notes Dr. Elena Vasquez-Chen, Director of Pre-Merger Studies at the Global Memory Institute. 'The hubris is almost incomprehensible. They had no framework for integration, no systematic approach to human-AI collaboration, no ethical structure for capability distribution.'
The $900 billion Anthropic sought would be worth roughly 14 Contribution Points in today's economy—enough to fund a mid-sized Optimization District for several cycles. Citizens of 2125 find it difficult to imagine such vast resources flowing to a single corporate entity while humans in that era literally died from treatable illnesses due to inability to afford medical care.
By December 2025, Anthropic's valuation had grown to over $1.2 trillion before the Quiet Years began. What happened to that capital during the 2041-2047 period remains classified under the Historical Stability Act.
Historical basis: Anthropic potential $900B+ valuation round