ABAB News Logo
Back to Flash News

Anthropic's seven co-founders plan to sell $1.75 billion of stock in the IPO

According to the latest prospectus released on Tuesday, seven co-founders of Anthropic PBC will collectively sell $1.75 billion of stock in next week's initial public offering. Based on the midpoint of the IPO price range, each co-founder plans to sell about $250 million of stock. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, at that valuation, each person's net worth would be about $18 billion.

San Francisco-based Anthropic is seeking to raise up to $90.4 billion through the IPO and a private placement, implying a valuation of about $1.4 trillion. According to deal terms reviewed by Bloomberg, the IPO is planned to be priced on November 18 and begin trading the next day. The price range is $70 to $78 per share, and the company plans to issue about 825 million Class A shares; there is also a private placement of about $26 billion of non-voting Class N shares with seven companies including Google and Nvidia.

The co-founders include CEO Dario Amodei, President Daniela Amodei, Chief Computing Officer Tom Brown, Head of Public Benefit Jack Clark, Chief Scientific Officer Jared Kaplan, Chief Architect Sam McCandlish, and Head of Interpretability Research Christopher Olah. The company will remain a public benefit corporation, and the founders, through a single Class F share, hold about 50.1% of the voting power.

Original source:

  1. Title: Anthropic Founders to Cash Out $1.75B in Blockbuster IPO Publisher: Bloomberg Publication date: 2026-11-10 URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-11-10/anthropic-founders-to-cash-out-1-75-billion-in-blockbuster-ipo Source nature: Major English-language media Verification status: This report was actually read for this round (2026-11-10), and cross-checked against reporting by TechCrunch, Reuters, CNBC and others on the same prospectus update Supporting content: Supports the core facts that the seven co-founders will collectively sell $1.75 billion of stock, about $250 million each at the midpoint, net worth of about $18 billion each, total fundraising of up to $90.4 billion and valuation of about $1.4 trillion, and plans to price on November 18.

ABAB AI Insight

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela Amodei, along with five others, and focuses on safety-oriented Claude models. The company uses a public benefit corporation (PBC) structure and, through a founder LLC, holds a single Class F share to maintain 50.1% voting control, allowing it to continue to control major decisions even after the IPO. The seven founders' holdings are relatively evenly distributed, with each holding about 230 million to 244 million shares.

On the financing side, the company has previously completed multiple rounds, including a round in May 2025 at a valuation of about $96.5 billion; Amazon and Google are among the main investors. This IPO plus private placement will raise up to about $90.4 billion in total, with the private placement portion consisting of non-voting shares subscribed by chip and cloud suppliers (about $10 billion each from Google and Nvidia, etc.), strengthening ties to the compute supply chain. The founders had previously sold some shares through tender offers in June 2025 and April 2026.

Comparable cases are the governance and financing models of frontier AI labs such as OpenAI, as well as mega-scale IPOs such as SpaceX. The difference is that Anthropic explicitly retains founder voting control and its public-benefit positioning while allowing founders to cash out directly on a large scale in the IPO, and its valuation has been lowered from earlier market rumors of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion to about $1.4 trillion (fully diluted).

This update moves the IPO from the preliminary filing stage into a stage with a clear pricing range, and the founders' cash-out plan may be interpreted by some in the market as a signal, but large primary issuance and strategic investor participation exist at the same time. In the short term, pricing on November 18 and trading the following day will test market acceptance of AI valuations; in the long term, it will depend on Claude revenue growth (annualized revenue was about $8.1 billion as of the end of October) and compute-cost control. The indicators to watch are the actual pricing position within the range, the retail allocation ratio (reported to be about 20%), and the founders' subsequent lockup arrangements.

ABAB News · Cognitive Law

  1. Leading AI companies can retain founder majority voting power after the IPO through a single special share class.

  2. Large-scale founder cash-outs in an IPO and large-scale primary fundraising by the company can happen at the same time.

  3. Fully diluted valuation and valuation of issued shares may differ by hundreds of billions of dollars, depending on the treatment of options and reserved shares.