The new Medici are not in Florence. They are in AI

In the last 24 hours, we have been reminded just how much money is now flooding into artificial intelligence. Anthropic has been reported at a $965bn post-money valuation after a $65bn funding round, putting it ahead of OpenAI, whose last reported valuation was $852bn in March. In other words, these two businesses alone are now brushing up against a combined value of $1.8tn. That is not just a technology story. It is a patronage story.

Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age (one of my favourite reads of 2025) is useful here because it warns us not to romanticise history. Her argument is that “golden ages” are not simple facts; they are stories societies construct for legitimacy, identity and power. The Renaissance, in that reading, was not some neat explosion of genius in a vacuum. It was messy, political, competitive and heavily shaped by the people who controlled money, influence and visibility.

That is exactly why the Italian comparison works. The Medici were merchants and bankers whose wealth gave them virtual rule in Florence, and under their patronage the city became a centre of humanist learning and artistic flourishing. Lorenzo de’ Medici is credited with advancing the careers of both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. In Milan, Ludovico Sforza patronised Leonardo as well. These families were not simply being generous. They were using art, architecture and ideas to project power, shape culture and buy a form of immortality.

So who will today’s AI giants sponsor?

Not, in my opinion, the people who merely know how to write clever prompts.

They will sponsor the creators who make their models commercially indispensable. The new superstars will be the filmmakers who invent new formats, the educators who can turn complexity into clarity, the software founders who wrap raw AI into usable workflow, the scientists who shorten discovery cycles, and the clinicians who combine machine intelligence with human trust. The winners will not be the loudest people on LinkedIn. They will be the people who can translate intelligence into outcomes.

And that is where this becomes relevant to dentistry and every other owner-managed business in the UK and Ireland.

The age of AI creativity will not reward vanity. It will reward application.

The next Michelangelo may not paint a chapel ceiling. He or she may design the most trusted AI-assisted patient communication system, the most elegant diagnostic interface, the most persuasive education platform, or the most human treatment-planning experience. The medium changes. The patronage model remains.

My hunch is simple. OpenAI, Anthropic and the rest will not just fund infrastructure. They will fund influence, distribution, ecosystems and talent.

The smart question for business owners is not, “Is this a bubble?”

The smarter question is, “When these new Medici start backing the creators of the AI age, will I be close enough to benefit?”