Anthropic founders to sell 3.38m shares each in planned IPO

Key points

• Each of the seven co-founders will sell 3,378,378 shares, raising just under $250m each at the $74 midpoint.
• The IPO price range is $70 to $78 a share, with the company valued at up to $1.4tn.
• Board members Reed Hastings and Christopher Liddell want to buy $300m and $3m of shares respectively.

Anthropic's seven co-founders will each sell 3,378,378 shares in the company's planned IPO, according to a new S-1 filing reported by TechCrunch. At the $74 midpoint of the $70 to $78 range the company has floated, each founder would take in just under $250m. At the low end each would receive just over $236m, and at the high end just under $264m.

The filing points to strong demand. Board member Reed Hastings has indicated he wants to buy $300m of shares through his donor-advised fund, and board member Christopher Liddell wants $3m worth. The IPO could value Anthropic at $1.4tn.

Voting control retained

The 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 interpretability research lead Christopher Olah. After the sale each will hold about 3.2% of outstanding Class A shares, or roughly 22% between them. That is not their share of the whole company, since Amazon and Google hold nonvoting Class N stock.

Each founder will also get one Class F share carrying supervoting rights, giving the group 51.1% of votes while keeping their individual holdings broadly even. The seven left OpenAI in 2021 after disagreements over how AI should be built, and Anthropic has stressed AI safety as its focus since launch.

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