The key facts

  • Each of Anthropic's seven founders is selling 3,378,378 shares at a price range of $70–78 per share
  • At a price of $74, each founder's proceeds will be nearly $250 million; within the range, from ~$236 to ~$264 million
  • The founders will retain control: 51.1% of votes via Class F shares with combined ~22% of Class A

What the S-1 reveals

As the company prepares for an IPO that could value Anthropic at $1.4 trillion, it has disclosed in a new S-1 filing the volume of shares being sold by its seven co-founders, TechCrunch reports. Each of them will offer 3,378,378 shares. The initial price range has been set unusually wide — from $70 to $78 per share. At the midpoint price of $74, each founder will receive just under $250 million; at the lower bound of $70, just over $236 million, and at the upper bound of $78, just under $264 million. TechCrunch notes that in such highly anticipated offerings, shares are often priced above the initial range.

Who is selling and what the founders will retain

The seven co-founders are CEO Dario Amodei; president and board chair Daniela Amodei; chief compute officer Tom Brown; head of public benefit Jack Clark; chief science officer Jared Kaplan; chief architect Sam McCandlish, and head of interpretability research Christopher Olah. After the sale, each will hold about 3.2% of the issued Class A shares, or roughly 22% among all of them. This is not a share of the entire company: Anthropic has several classes of shares, and Amazon and Google, among others, hold non-voting Class N shares, so the founders' share of total equity will be noticeably smaller. Nevertheless, the group retains control: each founder will receive one Class F share with super-voting rights, and together they will control 51.1% of the votes, with no single founder holding a substantially larger share of stock or votes than the others.

Demand and the company's origins

The S-1 already shows signs of high demand: board member Reed Hastings has stated his intention to buy $300 million worth of shares through his donor-advised fund, and board member Christopher Liddell — $3 million worth. The founders left OpenAI in 2021 over disagreements with its leadership about how AI should be developed, and founded Anthropic, which from the very beginning has publicly emphasized a greater focus on AI safety than its competitors, including the founders' former employer.