All 7 Anthropic founders will each cash out about $250M in IPO

As Anthropic barrels toward an enormous IPO that could value it at $1.4 trillion, the company has disclosed a tidbit in its new S-1 filing about how many shares each of its seven co-founders plan to sell.

Each will sell 3,378,378 shares. Anthropic has floated an unusually broad initial price range of $70 to $78 a share. At the mid-range of $74, each founder would take in just shy of $250 million.

At the low end, $70, each would have to settle for pocketing just over $236 million cash; at the high end, $78, each would take in just under $264 million.

However, in an IPO as eagerly anticipated as this one, companies can often price shares above the initial range.

The S-1 is already hinting at high demand. Board member Reed Hastings has indicated he wants to buy $300 million worth of shares through his donor-advised fund. Board member Christopher Liddell also wants to buy $3 million worth of shares.

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 (pictured above); Sam McCandlish, chief architect; and Christopher Olah, interpretability research lead.

After the sale, each of them will own about 3.2% of the total outstanding Class A shares, the S-1 says, or roughly 22% collectively. That’s not their share of the company overall. Class A is just one of Anthropic’s share classes, and other holders, including Amazon and Google, hold non-voting Class N shares, so the founders’ stake in the company’s total equity will be considerably smaller. Even still, they, as a group, remain in control of the company. Each will also receive one share of Class F stock, which carries supervoting rights. Collectively, the founders will control 51.1% of the votes, but no single founder will hold significantly more shares or votes than the others.

As is now industry lore, the seven left OpenAI to start Anthropic in 2021 after disagreements with OpenAI’s leadership over how AI should be built. Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who held senior research and policy roles at OpenAI, were joined by five fellow OpenAI colleagues in forming a company that has said, very publicly and from the start, that it’s more focused on AI safety than its rivals, including the founders’ former employer.