Sequoia Capital is reportedly joining a blockbuster funding round for Anthropic, the AI startup behind Claude, according to the Financial Times. It’s a move sure to turn heads in Silicon Valley.
Why? Because venture capital firms have historically avoided backing competing companies in the same sector, preferring to place their bets on a single winner. Yet here’s Sequoia, already invested in both OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, now throwing its weight behind Anthropic, too.
The timing is particularly surprising given what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said under oath last year. As part of OpenAI’s defense against Musk’s lawsuit, Altman addressed rumors about restrictions in OpenAI’s 2024 funding round. While he denied that OpenAI investors were broadly prohibited from backing rivals, he did acknowledge that investors with ongoing access to OpenAI’s confidential information were told that access would be terminated “if they made non-passive investments in OpenAI’s competitors.” Altman called this “industry standard” protection (which it is) against misuse of competitively-sensitive information.
According to the FT, Sequoia is joining a funding round led by Singapore’s GIC and U.S. investor Coatue, which are each contributing $1.5 billion. Anthropic is aiming to raise $25 billion or more at a $350 billion valuation — more than double its $170 billion valuation from just four months ago. The WSJ and Bloomberg had earlier reported the round at $10 billion. Microsoft and Nvidia have committed up to $15 billion combined, with VCs and other investors said to be contributing another $10 billion or more.
The Sequoia connection with Altman runs deep. When Altman dropped out of Stanford to start Loopt, Sequoia backed him. He later became a “scout” for Sequoia, introducing the firm to Stripe, which became one of the firm’s most valuable portfolio companies. Sequoia’s new co-leader Alfred Lin and Altman also appear comparatively close. Lin has interviewed Altman numerous times at Sequoia events, and when Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI in November 2023, Lin publicly said he’d eagerly back Altman’s “next world-changing company.”
While Sequoia’s investment in xAI might seem to have already contradicted the traditional VC approach of picking winners, that bet is widely viewed as less about backing an OpenAI competitor and more about deepening the firm’s extensive ties to Elon Musk. Sequoia invested in X when Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it, is an investor in SpaceX and The Boring Company, and is a major backer of Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company. Former longtime Sequoia leader Michael Moritz was even an early investor in Musk’s X.com, which became part of PayPal.
Sequoia’s apparent reversal on portfolio conflicts is especially glaring given its historical stance. As we reported in 2020, the firm took the extraordinary step of walking away from its investment in payments company Finix after determining the startup competed with Stripe. Sequoia forfeited its $21 million investment, letting Finix keep the money while giving up its board seat, information rights, and shares, marking the first time in the firm’s history it had severed ties with a newly funded company over a conflict of interest. (Sequoia had led Finix’s $35 million Series B round just months earlier.)
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The reported Anthropic investment comes after dramatic leadership changes at Sequoia, where the firm’s global steward, Roelof Botha, was forced aside in a surprise vote this fall just days after sitting down with this editor at TechCrunch Disrupt, with Lin and Pat Grady — who’d led that Finix deal — taking over.
Anthropic is reportedly preparing for an IPO that could come as soon as this year. We’ve reached out to Sequoia Capital for comment.
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![US cybersecurity agency CISA had to build its incident playbook during the incident, agency reveals | TechCrunch
U.S. federal cybersecurity agency CISA said it did not have a prepared response plan for how it should handle a cybersecurity incident in May, after an investigative reporter notified the agency that a contractor had publicly exposed sensitive keys and credentials for accessing U.S. government systems.
CISA, the Homeland Security unit tasked with defending federal networks and helping to safeguard critical infrastructure, revealed Friday in a postmortem report that its staff “had to spend time building [a playbook] during the early stages of the incident.” The agency said it is important to prepare playbooks for “all anticipated needs” to ensure that organizations are ready to respond in the event of a security incident rather than scrambling to improvise one in real time.
The agency did not say how long the missing playbook delayed CISA’s response, and a spokesperson did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs reported in May that a security researcher with cyber firm GitGuardian alerted him to reams of exposed passwords stored in a publicly accessible GitHub repository, which an employee of a CISA contractor had uploaded.
According to Krebs, the researcher tried to alert the contractor but didn’t hear back. Only after Krebs contacted CISA did the agency take the repository offline and revoke and replace all of the exposed credentials to prevent any potential future abuse.
CISA said that no customer or mission data was exposed in the incident and thanked the researcher and reporter for their help. The agency said that its channels for allowing security researchers to notify CISA of potential incidents “were not well defined,” and that it has made changes to make it easier and faster for researchers to contact the agency.
CISA has been without a permanent director since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term in January 2025. The agency has also been affected by cuts, furloughs, and layoffs affecting about a third of its workforce since Trump took office.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#cybersecurity #agency #CISA #build #incident #playbook #incident #agency #reveals #TechCrunchCISA,cybersecurity,us government](https://i0.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/cisa-2240293485.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&ssl=1 "US cybersecurity agency CISA had to build its incident playbook during the incident, agency reveals | TechCrunch
U.S. federal cybersecurity agency CISA said it did not have a prepared response plan for how it should handle a cybersecurity incident in May, after an investigative reporter notified the agency that a contractor had publicly exposed sensitive keys and credentials for accessing U.S. government systems.
CISA, the Homeland Security unit tasked with defending federal networks and helping to safeguard critical infrastructure, revealed Friday in a postmortem report that its staff “had to spend time building [a playbook] during the early stages of the incident.” The agency said it is important to prepare playbooks for “all anticipated needs” to ensure that organizations are ready to respond in the event of a security incident rather than scrambling to improvise one in real time.
The agency did not say how long the missing playbook delayed CISA’s response, and a spokesperson did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs reported in May that a security researcher with cyber firm GitGuardian alerted him to reams of exposed passwords stored in a publicly accessible GitHub repository, which an employee of a CISA contractor had uploaded.
According to Krebs, the researcher tried to alert the contractor but didn’t hear back. Only after Krebs contacted CISA did the agency take the repository offline and revoke and replace all of the exposed credentials to prevent any potential future abuse.
CISA said that no customer or mission data was exposed in the incident and thanked the researcher and reporter for their help. The agency said that its channels for allowing security researchers to notify CISA of potential incidents “were not well defined,” and that it has made changes to make it easier and faster for researchers to contact the agency.
CISA has been without a permanent director since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term in January 2025. The agency has also been affected by cuts, furloughs, and layoffs affecting about a third of its workforce since Trump took office.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#cybersecurity #agency #CISA #build #incident #playbook #incident #agency #reveals #TechCrunchCISA,cybersecurity,us government")
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