A $500million stake in an Artificial Intelligence firm could help Sam Bankman-Fried's failed crypto exchange FTX out of trouble, according to a report.
Bankers who are working to clean up the mess left behind in the wake of FTX's bankruptcy in November are understood to be shopping the company's most valuable asset: a stake in Anthropic, an AI start-up that is now worth billions.
Perella Weinberg, the boutique bank given the task, is said to be teasing the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares in Anthropic as a way to help pay money owed to out-of-pocket FTX customers.
This is according to news outlet Semafor, who cited inside sources. It said FTX is thought to own $500 million worth of Anthropic stock.
The privately held company has gone from being relatively unknown to one of the leading and hottest firms in the AI boom in a matter of months.
Anthropic created the Claude chatbot which is competing with the likes of Open AI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard for dominance in the field.
While there are thousands of AI companies being funded around the world, only a select few provide the 'foundational models' that these start-up firms run on.
Anthropic is among them, along-side some of the biggest companies in the world - including Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
While Semafor said it was not clear how Bankman-Fried (the disgraced CEO of FTX) arrived at the $500million valuation, it is believed that the stocks in Anthropic could fetch up to nine figures, money that would pay former FTX customers.
However, the news outlet said bankers at Perella Weinberg are debating whether to sell the entire stake now or hold some back.
While the stock is worth a huge amount of money now, that could increase even further with valuations of AI firms only expected to increase in the months and years to come as the AI tech boom continues.
Anthropic is just two years old, and is already valued at $4.6billion having secured $750 million in venture capital investments.
The bankers now find themselves in a conundrum: sell now and recoup an expected half-a-billion dollars for those left shortchanged by FTX's collapse, or wait and hope that Anthropic continues its upward trajectory.
FTX filed for bankruptcy after Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, pulled out of a deal to acquire the company.
The bankruptcy filing described numerous corporate missteps, including the use of software to 'conceal the misuse of customer funds'.
The savings of hundreds of thousands of customers who deposited their holdings on the FTX platform are in jeopardy, and so they will be hoping that the bankers make the right choice over what to do when it comes to the Anthropic shares.
Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried is scheduled to be tried in October in New York.
And in their second major action against a big crypto player in two days, US regulators sued Coinbase on Tuesday, alleging its failure to register as a securities exchange venue exposed investors to risk.
The Securities and Exchange Commission charged that the largest digital currency trading platform in the United States had made billions of dollars by 'unlawfully facilitating the buying and selling of crypto asset securities.'
Shares of Coinbase tumbled on news of the lawsuit, which comes on the heels of charges unveiled Monday against cryptocurrency exchange Binance and founder Changpeng Zhao for numerous alleged securities law violations.
Coinbase slammed the SEC for turning the screws on a market that is still largely unregulated, a criticism that was levied by Binance the day before.
The largest crypto asset trading platform in the United States, Coinbase had 110 million users and $80 billion in assets at the end of 2022.
Filing a complaint in federal court, the SEC said Coinbase's failure to register as a securities exchange 'has deprived investors of significant protections, including inspection by the SEC, record-keeping requirements, and safeguards against conflicts of interest, among others.'
The suit follows Monday's move against Binance and Zhao for operating what the SEC called 'an extensive web of deception' and 'calculated evasion of the law.'
By CHRIS JEWERS
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