How rich Anthropic founders could get from its IPO

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The artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, maker of the hugely popular Claude AI models, filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on Monday. The company is reportedly aiming to go public by the end of November.

The company plans to list on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol ANT and reports suggest the IPO could value Anthropic at between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion. The filing has also brought attention to an unusual plan by its seven co-founders. They have pledged to give away 80% of their personal stakes in the company to charity which is nearly $80 billion, based on Anthropic's latest private funding valuation. However, the founders could continue to control most shareholder voting decisions even after giving away much of their wealth.

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Even after the company goes public, the co-founders could retain significant control over Anthropic. Before the IPO, Anthropic plans to issue one special Class F share to a limited liability company (LLC) controlled by the seven founders. This single share will give them 50.1% of the company's total voting power on most matters put to shareholders.

Anthropic founder owns 240 million shares

Each founder owns about 240 million shares, according to the S-1 registration statement Anthropic filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. What is even more surprising is that one co-founder owns more shares than CE0 Dario Amodei. At $58.90 per share, each co-founder’s stake would be worth between $13.7 billion and $14.4 billion. Together, the seven co-founders own about 1.69 billion shares, or roughly 10% of the company. If Anthropic goes public at a valuation of around $2 trillion, as Wall Street estimates suggest, each co-founder’s stake could be worth between $27 billion and $29 billion, according to a report in Fortune.

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Anthropic co-founder shareholdings

Source: Anthropic S-1 filing

Here's how much Anthropic co-founders might earn after IPO

In 2021, seven people quit OpenAI to co-found Anthropic. The seven co-founders are CEO Dario Amodei, his sister, Daniela Amodei, the company’s president and board chair Tom Brown, chief compute officer Jared Kaplan, chief science officerSam McCandlish, chief architect Chris Olah, who leads interpretability research Jack Clark, who leads the Anthropic Institute quit OpenAI to cofound Anthropic. All seven are listed as selling stockholders in the offering.

According to Anthropic’s IPO filing, co-founder Tom Brown owns about 244 million shares in the AI company. This is slightly more than the shares held by the other six co-founders, who each own between 232 million and 243 million shares. At a company valuation of $1.5 trillion, Brown’s stake could be worth about $24 billion.

Reuters

The contrast underscores Anthropic's appeal to investors even as concerns about competition from open-source models and AI safety weigh on the sector.

Before joining Anthropic, Tom Brown worked at OpenAI, where he led the engineering of GPT-3, according to Anthropic’s filing. He and Dario Amodei also helped develop a technique called deep reinforcement learning from human feedback (deep RLHF). This technique helped turn large AI models into conversational assistants such as Claude.

After Brown, Christopher Olah holds the second-largest stake, with about 243 million shares. Chief science officer Jared Kaplan owns about 242 million shares, while Jack Clark holds a similar number.

Anthropic President Daniela Amodei owns about 241 million shares. CEO Dario Amodei holds around 241 million shares and also controls voting rights for another 4.6 million shares.

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