All seven co-founders of Anthropic plan to sell 3,378,378 shares apiece in the company's upcoming initial public offering, according to a new S-1 filing. The disclosure comes as the artificial intelligence developer moves toward a listing that could value it at $1.4 trillion. Each founder's proceeds will depend on where the shares ultimately price.
Anthropic has set an unusually wide initial price range of $70 to $78 per share. At the midpoint of $74, each co-founder would collect just under $250 million in cash. At the low end of $70, each would take in slightly more than $236 million, while at the high end of $78, each would receive just under $264 million. Companies in heavily anticipated offerings can often price shares above their initial range.
The filing also points to strong demand. Board member Reed Hastings has signaled that he wants to purchase $300 million worth of shares through his donor-advised fund, and board member Christopher Liddell wants to buy $3 million worth. 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.
After the sale, each founder will hold about 3.2% of the total outstanding Class A shares, or roughly 22% combined, according to the S-1. That is not their stake in Anthropic overall. Class A is only one of the company's share classes, and other holders, including Amazon and Google, hold nonvoting Class N shares, so the founders' portion of total equity will be considerably smaller.
The founders will nevertheless remain in control of Anthropic. Each will also receive one share of Class F stock, which carries supervoting rights. Together the seven will control 51.1% of the votes, with no single founder holding significantly more shares or votes than the others.
The group started Anthropic in 2021 after leaving OpenAI amid disagreements with its leadership over how AI should be built. Dario and Daniela Amodei, who held senior research and policy roles at OpenAI, were joined by five former OpenAI colleagues. From the outset the company has publicly positioned itself as more focused on AI safety than rivals, including its founders' former employer.
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