Uncovering Anthropic’s First CFO: Investors are chasing him with money—he’s specifically responsible for turning down their gifts

According to Beating Monitoring, Anthropic is preparing for a super fundraising round with a valuation that is expected to surpass $900 billion. But in the frenzy of hot money streaming in at the doorstep, The Wall Street Journal disclosed the first CFO Krishna Rao’s highly abnormal ways of running the show: he not only repeatedly used “not yet funded” to discourage investors, but also deliberately refused the highest valuation the market offered, choosing to raise less money than expected and issuing conservative revenue guidance.

CEO Dario Amodei routinely writes lengthy, thousand-character philosophical essays and openly argues with the White House; Rao is the one who steps in to keep things from falling apart for him. Rao joined in May 2024. Before that, his most well-known showdown was in 2020, when the COVID-19 outbreak hit: he negotiated on the front lines to secure $1 billion in life-saving emergency funding for Airbnb.

When he worked at Blackstone, he won all of his boss’s chips at the poker table by pretending to be a novice, earning him the nickname “Rao Chairman” from his colleagues. Investors say he always knows when to move forward and when to step back.

Behind the lowered valuation and expectations is Rao’s most difficult calculation he’s dealing with right now. With Claude Code exploding in popularity, the company’s April revenue run rate has already surpassed $30 billion. The enormous demand forces him to decide immediately: whether to lock in hundreds of billions of dollars in computing power contracts for 2027 to 2029 in advance. If he places a heavy bet and future revenue slows down, those hardware assets could become a deadly depreciation burden.

This kind of extreme tug-of-war—something he experiences every single day—completely consumes his life. When he asked his Yale Law School mentor how to balance family life, the mentor directly told him to give up: “You can’t find balance anymore. This is a company that’s making history, and you’re in the room where history is being made. Ride it.”