Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says a missed investment opportunity in one of the leading AI companies triggered a massive investment in the Claude creator Anthropic.
In an interview with Matthew Berman, Benioff says the company wanted to invest in OpenAI but was unable to do so because Microsoft got in the way.
“We were really pining after investing in OpenAI. And no matter what we did in OpenAI, they refused to let us invest in OpenAI because Microsoft blocked us.”
While OpenAI tried to find ways for Salesforce to hop on the investment bandwagon, Benioff says the terms were unacceptable.
“Even though we knew OpenAI was a great company, and we wanted to invest in OpenAI, and we liked the OpenAI team and the leaders and friends with them and so forth, and they wanted us to even invest personally, but not professionally. We felt very conflicted with that.”
Benioff says the situation forced the company to back other AI firms, ultimately leading to a substantial investment in a competing company.
“So we were looking for more opportunities. So we invested in a series of AI companies, including Cohere and Mistral, and also Anthropic, because we just wanted to be part of this next generation of models. And that’s how we ended up investing about $330 million so far into Anthropic. So that’s been very exciting for us.”
Last month, Anthropic raised $30 billion to push its valuation to $380 billion, indicating that Salesforce owns about 0.86% of the Claude creator.
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