Anthropic is actively considering taking on new investment from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, according to an internal memo sent by CEO Dario Amodei and first reported by WIRED. The discussions, still in early stages, come as the company seeks to secure the billions needed to remain competitive in the global race to train frontier AI models, a race increasingly defined by geopolitical capital and infrastructure scale.
In the Slack message shared with staff, Amodei openly acknowledged the ethical tensions such funding presents, admitting that capital from Gulf states would “likely enrich dictators.” “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.” Still, he argued that without access to the kind of capital available in the Gulf – “easily $100B or more” – it will be “substantially harder to stay on the frontier.”
Anthropic, which was founded by ex-OpenAI researchers and has positioned itself as one of Silicon Valley’s most principled AI labs, had previously rejected capital from Saudi Arabia in 2024 due to national security concerns. That decision came as FTX’s nearly 8% stake in the company was being offloaded in bankruptcy, with most of the shares eventually acquired by ATIC Third International Investment, an Abu Dhabi-based vehicle, for around $500 million.
Now, the company appears more open to structured Gulf investment, albeit within what Amodei describes as a “narrowly scoped, purely financial” context – with no governance rights or operational influence. Still, he acknowledged the soft power risk that could come with such deals. “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,” he wrote. “But I think the right response is to see how much we can get without agreeing to these things.”
The memo comes at a time when U.S. AI companies are actively deepening ties with the Gulf. OpenAI has already announced a $500 billion sovereign AI initiative with backing from Abu Dhabi’s MGX and plans for a data centre in the UAE capital. Other major players, including Meta and xAI, are also reportedly in discussions with UAE- and Saudi-backed infrastructure providers. Anthropic, by contrast, has publicly opposed building large training clusters in the region, arguing that placing the AI supply chain in authoritarian countries poses a long-term security threat.
“The basis of our opposition to large training clusters in the Middle East, or to shipping H100s to China, is that the supply chain of AI is dangerous to hand to authoritarian governments,” Amodei wrote. “AI is likely to be the most powerful technology in the world.”
Still, he admitted the company is now operating in a changed landscape — one in which peers have moved forward with massive Gulf-backed data centers and partnerships. “Having failed to prevent that dynamic at the collective level, we're now stuck with it as an individual company,” he wrote. “The median position across the other companies appears to be ‘outsourcing our largest 5 GW training runs to UAE/Saudi is fine.’ That puts us at a significant disadvantage.”
Amodei also acknowledged the communications backlash that would likely follow a deal with Gulf LPs, describing external media narratives as simplistic and quick to shout hypocrisy. But he framed the decision as a reluctant strategic move, one driven by Anthropic’s need to remain viable against better-resourced rivals. “As with many decisions, this one has downsides,” he wrote, “but we believe it's the right one overall.”
The company has reiterated that it will not build data centres in the region and will continue enforcing its usage policy, but it is clear that Anthropic – like many of its peers – is being drawn into the gravitational pull of Gulf sovereign capital. In Abu Dhabi and Doha, that funding is increasingly being positioned as essential infrastructure for the next decade of global AI development.
