Anthropic's Seven Founders to Each Cash Out About $250M in IPO

Anthropic disclosed in its IPO filing that each of its seven co-founders plans to sell 3,378,378 shares. At the mid-range price of $74, each founder would take in nearly $250 million. At $70, each pockets just over $236 million; at $78, just under $264 million.

The seven co-founders are Dario Amodei, chief executive; Daniela Amodei, president and chair of the board; Tom Brown, chief compute officer; Jack Clark, head of public benefit; Jared Kaplan, chief science officer; Sam McCandlish, chief architect; and Christopher Olah, interpretability research lead.

The IPO could value Anthropic at $1.4 trillion. After the sale, each founder would own about 3.2% of the total outstanding Class A shares, or roughly 22% collectively. But Class A is just one of Anthropic's share classes, and other holders including Amazon and Google hold nonvoting Class N shares, so the founders' stake in the company's total equity will be considerably smaller.

Even so, the founders remain in control. Each will receive one share of Class F stock, which carries supervoting rights, and collectively the seven will control 51.1% of the votes, with no single founder holding significantly more shares or votes than the others.

The S-1 filing also hints at strong demand. Board member Reed Hastings indicated he wants to buy $300 million worth of shares through his donor-advised fund, and board member Christopher Liddell wants to buy $3 million worth of shares.

The seven co-founders left OpenAI in 2021 after disagreements over how AI should be built, and have since built Anthropic into a company that has publicly emphasized AI safety. Anthropic is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, parent of Google. In delayed trading, Alphabet (GOOGL) shares were up 2.11% and Amazon (AMZN) shares were down 1.74%.

The filing does not state when the IPO will price, and companies can often price shares above the initial range when demand is high.