Google is planning to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude models, according to Bloomberg. The investment will happen in two stages and is contingent on Anthropic reaching specific development milestones.

The first part of the deal involves a $10 billion cash commitment, which values Anthropic at $350 billion. An additional $30 billion could be provided if the company meets certain performance targets, bringing the total potential investment to $40 billion.

How the Investment Benefits Google’s Cloud Business

A large part of the investment is expected to go toward expanding Anthropic's computing capacity on Google Cloud, where the company is already a major customer. This arrangement means Google is effectively providing Anthropic with capital that ultimately increases Google's own cloud revenue as Anthropic trains and runs more models.

Google’s Access to Anthropic’s Mythos Model

The partnership also provides Google with access to Anthropic's unreleased Mythos model, which is considered too powerful or potentially too dangerous for broad public release at this stage. Reportedly, Google is among a small number of organizations that have insight into the model, offering it early access to Anthropic's most advanced research.

How This Deal Fits Into the AI Platform Race

The investment occurs even as Claude Opus models are competing directly with Google's Gemini in the AI coding market, an area Google has publicly identified as a strategic focus. The deal highlights a common pattern in the AI industry where major cloud providers fund competing AI developers, and their infrastructure spending benefits the cloud platform.

Anthropic has not commented on the details of the investment structure or the Mythos model. Google has also not publicly confirmed the deal.