7 of 10 Youngest US Billionaires Made Their Fortunes in AI Startups
Forbes' latest wealth list reveals that 10 billionaires under the age of 40 made the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, up from 4 last year, with 7 of them creating their wealth through AI startups. Notably, 4 of these 7 AI billionaires are co-founders of Anthropic, alongside leaders from OpenAI, Surge AI, and Cognition. This surge underscores how generative AI venture capital flows are generating individual fortunes at an unprecedented pace. It highlights the growing influence of young AI research labs and infrastructure providers in reshaping the broader technology economy. The threshold to join the Forbes 400 reached a record high of $4.4 billion this year. Key figures on the list include Anthropic co-founders Daniela Amodei and Tom Brown (net worth $15.5 billion each), Surge AI founder Edwin Chen ($18 billion), and OpenAI president Greg Brockman ($25.5 billion).
## BACKGROUND
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, focusing on building aligned and safe AI systems such as the Claude model family. Companies like Surge AI provide essential data annotation and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) services required to train modern large language models.