Anthropic’s seven co-founders each plan to sell 3,378,378 shares in the company’s initial public offering, according to its S-1 filing. At the filing’s mid-range share price of $74, each founder would receive just shy of $250 million.
What the proposed price range means
Anthropic has set an unusually broad initial price range of $70 to $78 a share. The final amount founders receive from the planned sales will depend on where shares are priced within that range.
At $70 a share, each founder would take in just over $236 million. At $78, each would receive just under $264 million. The company could also price shares above the initial range, as can happen with eagerly anticipated IPOs.
These figures describe the proceeds from the shares each founder plans to sell. They do not represent the founders’ full holdings or their share of Anthropic’s total equity.
Investors have signaled interest
The S-1 filing points to interest from two board members. Reed Hastings has indicated that he wants to buy $300 million worth of shares through his donor-advised fund. Christopher Liddell has indicated interest in buying $3 million worth.
Those potential purchases are part of the picture around the offering, but the filing’s stated price range and the planned founder sales are the clearest terms given for calculating the founders’ potential proceeds.
The founders’ ownership and voting power
After the sale, each co-founder is expected to own about 3.2% of Anthropic’s outstanding Class A shares, or roughly 22% collectively. That figure covers only Class A. Anthropic has other share classes, and holders including Amazon and Google own non-voting Class N shares, so the founders’ stake in the company’s total equity will be considerably smaller.
The founders’ voting influence is structured separately from their share of the equity. Each will receive one share of Class F stock, which carries supervoting rights. Together, the founders will control 51.1% of the votes, even though no individual founder will hold significantly more shares or votes than the others.
The filing therefore describes two different measures: the founders’ economic ownership and their ability to vote. The Class A percentages do not capture all of their voting power, which comes from the Class F shares.
Who is selling, and how Anthropic began
The seven co-founders are CEO Dario Amodei; 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.
They left OpenAI to start Anthropic in 2021 after disagreements with OpenAI’s leadership over how AI should be built. Dario and Daniela Amodei had held senior research and policy roles there, and five fellow OpenAI colleagues joined them in forming the company.
Anthropic has said publicly from the start that it is more focused on AI safety than its rivals, including its founders’ former employer. The proposed IPO sales put a specific dollar value on part of the founders’ holdings, while the Class F shares would preserve their collective voting control after the offering.