| You're receiving Dealmaker for free. Upgrade to a paid subscription to access all of our award-winning tech and business journalism. Subscribe to The Information here for 25% off your first year (normally $399). Welcome back! It's reasonable to ask that your VC backers not fund your greatest competitors. In the past, avoiding such rival investments was the norm! Still, OpenAI's private request of its backers, that they avoid investing in other artificial intelligence model makers, stands out. Increasingly investors have been funding rival AI businesses as a way to hedge their bets. They're likely to keep doing so, that is unless they've aligned themselves with OpenAI. It's asked investors in its $6.6 billion round to no longer back Anthropic, Elon Musk's xAI, AI search engine Perplexity and Safe Superintelligence Inc., the AI lab started by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, according to two people with direct knowledge of the request. Investors aren't contractually obliged, and there's no punishment if they do invest in a competitor later on, one of the people said. It's also clear that not all OpenAI backers will do what they're told. One investor who wrote a significant check in the $157 billion-valuation financing told me that OpenAI's objection alone would not be enough to stop them from making an investment in a rival. Still, many will fall in line. Who wants to risk antagonizing OpenAI? Besides showing the sway OpenAI has over its investors, the strong-arming could give OpenAI an edge if investors' near endless supply of capital for AI startups eventually hits bottom. Firms like Coatue Management, which invested $250 million in OpenAI's funding round, are no longer viable options for Anthropic and others, unless those investors choose to damage their relationship with OpenAI. That's bad news for these cash-hungry companies, who already have a finite number of investors capable of funding their monster rounds. OpenAI's demand, first reported by The Financial Times, is also likely to put many of the firms with a proven case of AI fever in a tricky situation, particularly SoftBank and Altimeter Capital. Altimeter founder Brad Gerstner is already an investor in Perplexity, and SoftBank earlier this year wrote Perplexity a small check for its $3 billion-valuation round. As Bill Gurley, the famed Uber investor and former Benchmark general partner noted, Uber as a private company prevented investors from investing in its rival, Lyft. (As this Wall Street Journal story notes, Lyft did the same.) But these moves, said Gurley, can backfire by suggesting to investors that a company is vulnerable, helping "cement the bull case for [the] rival." In that case, Anthropic may come to thank OpenAI. | 
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