The co-founders' sale plan
According to a report by IT之家 based on TechCrunch, Anthropic updated its listing prospectus on November 10. The seven people who founded the company intend to sell 337.84 thousand shares each in the initial public offering. At the midpoint of the indicated range, $74 per share, each co-founder would receive about $250 million, for a total of about $1.75 billion.
The set price range is $70 to $78 per share: applied to the founders' sales, it yields individual proceeds of between about $236 million and $264 million, an amount that will depend on the actual offering price. Overall, the seven are selling 23.6486 million shares, i.e. all of the shares offered for sale by existing shareholders in the transaction.
Among the founders involved are CEO Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei, along with Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Christopher Olah. The sale concerns about 1.4% of the shares originally held by each: after the transaction, each would retain between about 237 million and 240 million Class A shares, whose residual value at $74 would approach $18 billion.
Size of the offering and corporate control
The prospectus provides for the issuance of 825 million Class A shares: about 801 million placed by the company and the remainder by the seven co-founders. According to the materials, at the maximum price of $78 the company's fully diluted valuation could reach $1.404 trillion. Anthropic has applied to be listed on Nasdaq under the symbol "ANT".
The sale of a minority stake does not, according to the prospectus, affect the founders' control. Before the completion of the IPO, the company will issue to a Founder LLC formed by the seven a special Class F share without economic rights, which would give the entity 50.1% of the votes on ordinary matters submitted to the shareholders' meeting. Control over the composition of the board of directors would instead remain entrusted to a long-term Anthropic trust.
The picture that emerges is one of a transaction in which the founders monetize a very limited fraction of their equity while retaining, through dedicated corporate instruments, a dominant position in governance. The final offering price and the actual outcome of the listing remain to be verified, as the amounts received and the overall valuation indicated in the prospectus depend on them.
