Markets & Business
Anthropic's 7 founders to cash out about $250M each in IPO
Each of Anthropic's seven co-founders plans to sell 3,378,378 shares in the company's IPO, which at the proposed price range's midpoint would net roughly $250 million apiece.
As Anthropic heads toward an IPO that could value the company at $1.4 trillion, its new S-1 filing discloses how many shares each of its seven co-founders intends to sell: 3,378,378 apiece. Anthropic has set an unusually wide initial price range of $70 to $78 a share. At the $74 midpoint, each founder would collect just shy of $250 million; at the low end of $70, about $236 million; and at the high end of $78, just under $264 million. Companies in highly anticipated IPOs like this one can also end up pricing shares above the initial range.
Demand already looks strong: board member Reed Hastings intends to purchase $300 million in shares via his donor-advised fund, and fellow board member Christopher Liddell plans to put in $3 million. Besides CEO Dario Amodei, the founding group spans Daniela Amodei (president and board chair), Tom Brown (who holds the chief compute officer title), Jack Clark (leading public-benefit work), Jared Kaplan (serving as chief science officer), Sam McCandlish (chief architect) and Christopher Olah (who runs interpretability research).
After selling, each founder will hold about 3.2% of the outstanding Class A shares — roughly 22% collectively — though that understates their overall stake, since other holders including Amazon and Google hold non-voting Class N shares. Each founder will also receive one share of supervoting Class F stock, and together the group will control 51.1% of the vote, with no single founder holding markedly more shares or votes than the rest. The seven left OpenAI in 2021 over disagreements about how AI should be built, with siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei — who had held senior research and policy roles at OpenAI — joined by five former colleagues to found a company that has said from the start it prioritizes AI safety over its rivals, including its founders’ former employer.
Why it matters
The disclosure quantifies just how much personal wealth seven people stand to realize from one IPO, while the founders’ retained supervoting stock shows Anthropic is structuring its public listing to keep decision-making concentrated in the same hands that built the company.