Gavin Newsom is hyping an artificial intelligence start up in California – and it could help his buddies and connections secure a colossal payday.
Anthropic, the red-hot AI company best known for Claude, has filed to go public as early as October with a valuation of about $1 trillion.
Newsom backers Omidyar Network, run by billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and the Ford Foundation, own roughly 250,000 Anthropic shares between them — a stake that could earn them $250 million to fund woke political causes when it goes public.
Anthropic products are already used in a customer service tool for California’s Department of Tax and Fee Administration.
And the firm is also involved in Newsom’s heavily promoted ”Engaged California” AI regulation push, with Claude crunching data collected by the state.
Left-wing megacharities Omidyar and Ford Foundation have quietly bankrolled Newsom and his wife’s pet causes, as the governor hands a collection of friendly nonprofits the keys to California’s AI rulebook.
“It’s a progressive advocacy network working with a progressive politician and a company with a reputation for being fairly progressive in its social outlook — all working to set the rules for a frontier of the economy,” said Mike Lee of Capital Research, a watchdog group that tracks nonprofit money in politics.
“Do you call it a conflict of interest, or ‘doing well by doing good’? It depends on what side you’re on,” Lee added.
Anthropic filed confidentially for its upcoming IPO Monday and was last valued at $965 billion.
Omidyar, Ford and fellow “impact investor” Nathan Cummings Foundation snapped up just under 250,000 shares of Anthropic in the FTX bankruptcy sale, ImpactAlpha reported.
In Washington, DC in May, Newsom championed an AI mass welfare plan, citing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s grim warnings about catastrophic job losses. He published an executive order on AI job disruption — the latest of several AI regulations.
“[Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei] is the best of the lot, I think that’s universally accepted,” Newsom crowed on a recent episode of his podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom — alongside Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, two researchers from the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit funded by Omidyar and Ford Foundation.
Omidyar cut a $50,000 behested payment to First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s California Partners Project, sponsoring a December 2025 “gender equity summit” starring Newsom’s wife.
Ford Foundation, meanwhile, has bankrolled the globe-trotting governor’s California Protocol Foundation, which pays for his headline-making international travel.
After Newsom directed state agencies to study AI risks in a 2023 executive order, Omidyar and allies announced a $25 million funding blitz for “responsible, equitable AI” — then teamed with the Kapor Center to launch an “AI academy” to train California lawmakers on “AI fundamentals, algorithmic bias, and data privacy.”
Omidyar’s Anthropic stake went publicly unmentioned.
In March, Newsom signed a sweeping executive order that forces state agencies to avoid “harmful bias” and threats to civil rights — a move that was widely seen as helping Anthropic, which faced a Pentagon blacklist after it clashed with the feds over weaponry and surveillance.
Newsom then tapped a roster of the aligned nonprofits — the San Francisco Foundation, the Kapor Center, the Berggruen Institute — as partners in his “Engaged California” plan, which purportedly gathers public input on AI regulations.
Omidyar backs the San Francisco Foundation, while Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, another participant, has taken Omidyar money for AI governance work. Kapor Center is another go-to Newsom donor, giving $40,000 to Californians Dedicated to Education Foundation at the governor’s request in 2020.
“Omidyar Network’s work is focused on advancing the public interest,” Omidyar spokesperson Nicole Allred said in an email.
“Given the speed and scale of AI’s impact, we believe philanthropy has an important role to play in catalyzing more responsible technology companies and supporting the independent policy capacity, research, and civic engagement needed to build a digital future that works for all of us.”
The nonprofit uses a “dual checkbook” structure that separates grants from investment activity, Allred added.
Just last week, Ford and Omidyar joined eight other foundations to launch Humanity AI, a $500 million initiative to shape AI governance at the state and federal level.
Its first $18 million in grants went to groups doing regulatory advocacy — including the Center for Democracy and Technology, which got $500,000 to push AI policy in statehouses and Washington.
Anthropic has cast itself as the “responsible” AI player — backing Senate Bill 53, a California transparency law Newsom signed last year.
The firm spent more than $200,000 to lobby California representatives last year, CalMatters reported.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has meanwhile warned of AI doom, claiming a 25% chance things go “really badly” for humanity — rhetoric that conveniently makes the case for the kind of regulation Newsom is pushing.
Newsom’s spokesperson Tara Gallegos called The Post’s reporting a “conspiracy theory” and claimed his donors have no influence on policy decisions.
“You get rules written that you like, and you’re the ones left standing — because you’re built for the rules,” Lee added.