Anthropic S-1 shows all seven founders selling shares worth about $250 million each in IPO

Anthropic's S-1 filing, submitted ahead of an initial public offering that TechCrunch reports could value the company at $1.4 trillion, discloses that all seven co-founders intend to sell shares in the listing, each set to walk away with roughly a quarter of a billion dollars.

What the founders are selling

According to TechCrunch, each of the seven co-founders plans to sell 3,378,378 shares. Anthropic has floated an unusually broad initial price range of $70 to $78 per share. At the $74 midpoint, each founder would take in just under $250 million. The low end of the range would still leave each with a bit more than $236 million, while pricing at the top would push the figure to just under $264 million.

As TechCrunch points out, companies in IPOs as eagerly anticipated as this one often price their shares above the initial range, so the final proceeds could be larger still.

The filing also offers early hints of demand. Board member Reed Hastings has indicated he wants to buy $300 million worth of shares through his donor-advised fund, and fellow board member Christopher Liddell plans to purchase $3 million worth.

Who is selling

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.

Ownership and control after the sale

The S-1 also lays out what the founders will keep. After the sales, each will hold about 3.2% of the total outstanding Class A shares, or roughly 22% collectively. TechCrunch cautions that this is not their share of the company as a whole: Class A is just one of Anthropic's share classes, and other holders, including Amazon and Google, own non-voting Class N shares. The founders' slice of the company's total equity will therefore be considerably smaller.

Even so, the founders stay firmly in control. Each will also receive one share of Class F stock, which carries supervoting rights. Collectively, the seven will control 51.1% of the votes, and no single founder will hold significantly more shares or votes than the others.

A company born from an OpenAI split

The founders started Anthropic in 2021 after leaving OpenAI over disagreements with its leadership about how AI should be built, as TechCrunch recounts. Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who held senior research and policy roles at OpenAI, were joined by five OpenAI colleagues in forming a company that has said publicly, from the outset, that it is more focused on AI safety than its rivals, including the founders' former employer.

Why it matters

An IPO at a potential $1.4 trillion valuation would be a landmark moment for the AI industry, and the founders' paydays, in the hundreds of millions each, illustrate how much value AI labs have generated in just five years.

The share structure is just as consequential as the price tag. The founders are cashing out part of their economic stakes while retaining a voting majority through Class F supervoting shares, meaning control of the company stays concentrated even as public investors and major backers like Amazon and Google hold large positions. For a company that has built its identity around AI safety, who holds the reins after it goes public is a question worth watching alongside the ticker price.