Vas Narasimhan, CEO of the pharma giant Novartis, joined Anthropic's board of directors in April.
Hollie Adams/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Anthropic is starting to think like a drugmaker.
Anthropic's IPO filing outlines its ambitious plans for biological science.
AI in scientific research would aid Anthropic's mission and boost adoption of its Claude models.
Anthropic conquered coding. Now it's setting its sights on the human body.
Anthropic's S-1 filing, which outlines its ambitions and financials ahead of a massive initial public offering next month, reads as a life-sciences manifesto. The maker of Claude sees itself as a crucial cog in the next generation of biological and medicinal research — and is selling that lucrative vision to its would-be investors.
Anthropic is hoping for a wave of new discoveries that will support its do-gooder mission and convince the public of AI's power and worth. Its life-science focus could also support financial growth beyond its AI software engineering tools. It would promote the use of Anthropic's most advanced, expensive models in an industry already accustomed to spending billions on research and development.
The S-1filing is scattered with references to biotech ambition. Its second line says AI "could rapidly accelerate scientific innovation" and "bring cures for major diseases within reach." A page later, biological progress tops the company's list of ways it hopes AI will improve lives.
Anthropic also references its life sciences business in its "growth strategy" section and writes that nine of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies and eight of the 10 largest healthcare companies in the Fortune 500 spent at least $100,000 with Anthropic over a recent yearlong period.
"In the life sciences sector, where annual global pharmaceutical spend is expected to exceed $2 trillion in 2026, Claude is used in drug discovery and development by our customers, our biotechnology partners, and our own researchers," the company writes in the filing.
Anthropic declined to comment.
Anthropic has begun investing in life sciences
Anthropic has already gotten to work investing in life sciences. The company's Claude Science product, which is in beta, came out in June. OpenAI, Anthropic's erstwhile rival, has a competing offering dubbed Rosalind, while Google spinoff Isomorphic Labs plans to use AI to create cancer-beating drugs — promising a struggle between companies for research customers.
Besides that, Anthropic started a molecular biology lab in the Bay Area this year and spent $400 million in stock in April to buy the biotech startup Coefficient Bio. Vas Narasimhan, the CEO of the pharmaceutical company Novartis, also joined Anthropic's board in April. In August, Anthropic announced a new robotics standard that allows AI to control lab equipment.
The company's careers page shows it's on a hiring spree for life sciences roles across chemistry, experimental biology, research engineering, and more. Two new roles opened late this week, offering $320,000 salaries to researchers capable of designing and manufacturing antibodies.
In its S-1, Anthropic touted its work with pharma giant Lilly, saying the $1.3 trillion company has 50,000 employees with access to a Claude enterprise account and that more than 85% of its staff actively use the tool.
CEO Dario Amodei is prioritizing life sciences
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a former theoretical physicist, has repeatedly touted AI's potential in the life sciences as a reason to advance the tech's capabilities.
In a September essay about "pacing" AI research, Amodei said he had survived a cancer that wouldn't have been treatable in the 1970s, and his father had died of a disease cured shortly after his death.
He previously elaborated on the themes in a 2024 essay dubbed "Machines of Loving Grace."
"Biology is probably the area where scientific progress has the greatest potential to directly and unambiguously improve the quality of human life," Amodei wrote, adding that he hopes AI-enabled research will help prevent and treat all infectious diseases, eliminate most cancers, and double the human lifespan.
The general public is less optimistic. Anthropic recently published survey results from August, finding that 91% of staff think AI will make a Nobel-level discovery by 2030, compared with 39% of US adults. No AI-designed drugs have ever received FDA approval.
Ben Mann, the co-leader of Anthropic's Labs organization, which builds new products and created Claude Code, told Business Insider this August that his small team is also focusing more on life sciences.
"Labs itself has shifted its focus from sort of more standard software engineering things to things like what Dario has described as curing all diseases like, Machines of Loving Grace-style," Mann said.
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It’s almost hard to remember, but just a few years ago, a lot of very smart people thought that science was in terminal decline. Respected researchers were writing papers with titles like “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time”, and “Slowed canonical progress in large fields of […]
A former Anthropic employee wrote a Substack post about his several-month stint at the company.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
A former Anthropic employee wrote a Substack post about his 8-month stint at the then-new AI lab.
It offers a rare look at Anthropic's early, safety-obsessed culture that the author said left him burned out.
He describes a visit from the FBI and fresh croissants in an ugly office.
Anthropic's executives raced to build a safe AI — and one former employee said that pursuit left him feeling burned out and disillusioned.
In a lengthy Substack post, Ivan Vendrov, who worked as a member of the AI lab's technical staff from late 2022 to mid-2023, described an intense workplace, where fears of AI catastrophe clashed with the urge to build safe AGI for commercial use.
Vendrov began the post by saying his account should not be taken as gospel. He said he recalled the events "from memory," wrote the "gist of the dialogue rather than the exact words used," and that the post is "merely the experience of one guy in a junior role during a short window of time."
Still, it's a remarkable look into the early days of one of the world's preeminent AI companies, with a named employee explaining how the company's formative period created a highly particular workplace.
Vendrov, whose LinkedIn says he now works at Midjourney, wrote that he was weighing contract offers from OpenAI and Anthropic in 2022.
He says he decided to join Anthropic after lunch with one of the AI company's cofounders, who said they were already chatting with regulators in Washington.
A recruiter asked whether he wanted to pledge two-thirds of his equity to charity.
"All the co-founders have made the pledge," Vendrov recalled the recruiter saying. He wrote that he was unsure whether the job offer was contingent on his agreement, so he said yes.
Anthropic's S-1 filing describes an employee donation-matching program, where workers can pledge a "meaningful portion" of their equity awards. The company reported that 50% of its employees are included in the program.
Vendrov described a cramped, ugly office. He said it was stocked with fresh croissants and, later, a popular masseuse came twice a week. He said he was never able to schedule a massage because it was always fully booked.
There was a visit from the FBI once, he wrote. The agent warned that Anthropic was "probably already the target of multiple foreign intelligence agencies."
Anthropic also hosted a sushi chef in the office, Vendrov wrote — but the luxe experience was met with resistance. The following day, he said a cofounder wrote in the company Slack that it set the wrong tone.
"We're not here to get rich and eat caviar," they said, per Vendrov's memory, before pitching future dinners of rice and beans.
The burnout
Vendrov's post detailed sleepless nights, walks with other stressed-out colleagues, and moments where he felt he couldn't be honest about his emotions with colleagues.
Eight months after signing his contract offer, Vendrov said he wrote a resignation letter. As he drafted the letter, he said he thought about describing his doubts to the company, but worried it would create doubt in colleagues who were "smarter than me, more competent than me, more solidly well-intentioned than me."
Instead, he said he praised Anthropic as an "unbelievably good organization."
Vendrov did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Congress should build an independent fund that accepts contributed equity from any company, holds it in a diversified portfolio and dedicates the returns to the trust funds.
Congress should build an independent fund that accepts contributed equity from any company, holds it in a diversified portfolio and dedicates the returns to the trust funds.
Mathematicians need to develop their oft-neglected social skills, a math professor at Cornell said.
Though AI can do the legwork on complex problems, personal charisma is a human-only skill, Steven Strogatz said.
"Rizz is more and more in demand," he added.
"Social skills" and "mathematics" are terms not often grouped together. In the age of AI, one math scholar says that needs to change.
With AI now capable of handling the geeky legwork required by complex problems, Steven Strogatz, a lecturer and Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professor at Cornell University, said mathematicians should prioritize developing their personal charm in order to set themselves apart.
"I'm starting to think that what makes a future mathematician or a math professor is your unique brand," Strogatz said in an interview with Grant Sanderson, a math educator affiliated with Stanford University.
"Rizz is in more and more demand because it's something that only people have," he added.
Rizz, a Gen Z slang term, is defined by Merriam-Webster as "romantic appeal or charm." (Strogatz, who is 67, appeared to use the term solely to mean charm or charisma. He did not suggest mathematicians need to work on their romantic prowess.)
"What we're selecting for is an element of mathematical rizz," said Sanderson. "The PhDs to be are not going to be differentiated by pure problem-solving abilities."
The brusque push of AI companies into mathematics has caused consternation and head-scratching from many a math geek, as the field ponders ways to stay relevant while OpenAI floods the zone with hundreds of proposed solutions to the world's most complex problems.
Some professors have sworn off AI altogether. Most, however, are trying to find ways to incorporate the technology into their work.
In September, a group of undergraduates at Caltech announced a "mathathon" event in which participants were encouraged to use AI to solve problems in a single, no-sleep sprint. Only days after the undergrads announced the event, a coalition of over 700 academics signed an open letter calling for its cancellation, citing its promotion of AI "slop."
Though the event is set to continue, with some slight alterations, the clash underscored an internal conflict in the math community over how to adapt to AI — a development poised to impact many burgeoning careers in the field.
"We've had whole research programs wiped out on Tuesday," Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU, said after OpenAI published 700 new findings about outstanding problems earlier this month.
The issue is of supreme importance to Strogatz, who has made several media appearances in the last couple of months. In an essay published in The Atlantic on Sunday, he put the issue in stark terms.
"I am a math professor, and my field is in crisis. Nobody in math is ever going to forget the year 2026," he wrote. "Unless this is really the end of the subject, and then nobody will remember anything about math anyway."
La Tierra se mueve de tres maneras: sobre sí misma, con la rotación; alrededor del Sol, con la traslación; y oscilando como una peonza, en un lentísimo movimiento que tarda en completarse unos 26.000 años y que se conoce como precesión. Debido a su existencia, el cielo de hoy es distinto al que vieron otros hombres y mujeres a lo largo de la historia. Con el esoterismo europeo de la primera mitad del siglo XX se popularizó la idea de que las eras astrológicas marcaban el signo de los tiempos, según donde estuviera el Sol en el primer día de primavera: la Antigua Grecia y la República romana coincidieron con la era de Aries, el cristianismo con la de Piscis y pronto llegará la de Acuario, si no lo ha hecho ya. La New Agese subió al carro, y Raphael se desató cantando aquello de Aquarius. Los 2.000 años de duración de cada era son flexibles: Carl Jung, por ejemplo, situaba el inicio de Acuario entre 2000 y 2200. La astrología tradicional, que prefiere medir los cambios de época con las conjunciones de los señores del tiempo, Júpiter y Saturno, que se unen ópticamente en el cielo cada 20 años, dice que el momento importante fue el 21 de diciembre de 2020, cuando se produjo la primera “gran conjunción” en Acuario desde la Edad Media. Las redes pensaron que, esta vez sí, iba a comenzar el nuevo tiempo, pero muy alejado de la paz y el amor que profetizó la interpretación hippie. Simbólicamente, Acuario es la ciencia y la tecnología, el progreso, la inteligencia, la comunidad y la revolución, pero todo ello de una forma desapegada y etérea, incluso implacable, porque es un signo de aire. El wifi de casa, por ejemplo, sería muy Acuario.
A divulgação do prospeto S-1, documento que antecede a entrada em bolsa, pela Anthropic, que detém o modelo Claude, na segunda-feira 28 de outubro, está a “reacender o entusiasmo” em torno da inteligência artificial (IA), afirma o analista da ActivTrades, Henrique Valente.
Este entusiasmo está refletido no avanço em 126 pontos do índice bolsista norte-americano Nasdaq na manhã desta quarta-feira 28 de outubro, adianta. “A publicação do prospeto S-1 da Anthropic, em preparação para a sua entrada em bolsa, ajudou a reacender o entusiasmo em torno da inteligência artificial, também alimentado por novos anúncios de financiamento e pelos resultados dos fabricantes de semicondutores”, referiu o analista.
No prospeto, a Anthropic revela que vai entrar em bolsa através do índice bolsista Nasdaq, com o símbolo ANT. Também foi divulgado que a empresa teve um prejuízo de 80,7 mil milhões de dólares (72,4 mil milhões de euros) nos primeiros seis meses do ano, quase o dobro face ao prejuízo de 41,9 mil milhões de dólares (37,6 mil milhões de euros) registado em 2025.
“A nossa receita foi de 16,3 mil milhões de dólares (14,6 mil milhões de euros) nos seis meses findos em 30 de junho de 2026, um aumento em relação aos 1,2 mil milhões de dólares (mil milhões de euros) registados nos seis meses findos em 30 de junho de 2025. O nosso prejuízo operacional foi de 693 milhões de dólares (622,3 milhões de euros) nos seis meses findos em 30 de junho de 2026, uma redução em relação aos 2,1 mil milhões de dólares (1,8 mil milhões de euros) registados nos seis meses findos em 30 de junho de 2025”, assinalou.
O documento mostra ainda que no final de setembro a empresa detentora do Claude tinha mais de 11.900 clientes com um volume de negócios igual ou superior a 100.000 dólares (89 mil euros) nos últimos doze meses, face aos mais de 950 do período homólogo. “Além disso, à medida que os clientes incorporam o Claude nos seus fluxos de trabalho mais críticos e iniciativas de crescimento, muitos expandem rapidamente as suas implementações para níveis de faturação mais elevados. Em 30 de setembro de 2026, tínhamos mais de 1.900 clientes com um volume de negócios igual ou superior a um milhão de dólares (900 mil euros) nos últimos doze meses e aproximadamente 250 clientes com um volume de negócios igual ou superior a 10 milhões de dólares (8,9 milhões de euros) nos últimos doze meses”, acrescentou.
A empresa explicou que este crescimento nos clientes é justificado pelo cada vez maior das soluções da Anthropic. “O valor que o Claude oferece aos clientes contribuiu para a nossa taxa de retenção de receitas líquidas de aproximadamente 900% em 30 de setembro de 2026”, assinalou. Foi ainda revelado que a receita aumentou 1.368% em termos homólogos nos três meses que acabaram em 30 de junho de 2026, enquanto que as despesas de computação e infraestruturas aumentaram 300% no mesmo período temporal.
O entusiasmo nos mercados de capital com a Anthropic espalhou-se a outras regiões. “Na Ásia, a SK Hynix e a Samsung Electronics chegaram a subir cerca de 8% esta manhã (28 de outubro). Na Europa, a ASML ganhou 2,8% na sessão de ontem (27 de outubro). Nos Estados Unidos, a Broadcom avançou 4% e a CoreWeave valorizou 7,9%, enquanto o Nasdaq Composite terminou a sessão [de 27 de outubro] com uma subida de aproximadamente 1,2%”, descreveu o analista da ActivTrades Europe.
Agora o foco está na reunião da Reserva Federal norte-americana (Fed), marcada para esta quarta-feira 28 de outubro, onde se decidirá o caminho das taxas de juro, acrescentou. “A expectativa dominante é de manutenção das taxas de juro no intervalo de 3,75% a 4,00%, após a subida de setembro. Sem atualização do dot plot nesta reunião, o foco estará no comunicado e na conferência de imprensa de Kevin Warsh, às 18h30. Perante a relutância do presidente da Fed em dar indicações explícitas sobre a trajetória futura das taxas de juro, os investidores procurarão sobretudo perceber se a pausa poderá prolongar-se ou se a persistência da inflação deixa aberta a porta a uma nova subida em dezembro”, conclui Henrique Valente.
Rishi Sunak was prime minister of the UK from 2022 to 2024.
Prakash Singh/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Rishi Sunak has senior advisor roles with Anthropic, Microsoft, and Goldman Sachs.
Sunak, who was the UK's prime minister between 2022 and 2024, makes up to $10,000 an hour from them.
Goldman paid him about $1.5 million, compared with Anthropic shares valued at about $500,000.
How much is Anthropic paying for the advice of the UK's former prime minister? A lot less than Microsoft.
Rishi Sunak, who led the country from 2022 to 2024, last year took on senior advisor roles with Anthropic, Microsoft, and Goldman Sachs.
As he still serves as a member of Parliament, the payments are detailed in a public register of MPs' financial interests. The most recent register, published Monday, shows Sunak earned more than £2.2 million, or over $2.9 million, from the three jobs.
Sunak, who started his career as a Goldman analyst before completing an MBA at Stanford, donated these earnings to charity. He and his wife Akshata Murthy set up The Richmond Project, which works to improve people's numeracy skills.
The couple is jointly worth about $750 million, according to The Sunday Times Rich List, with much of that wealth coming from Murthy, whose father founded Indian tech firm Infosys.
Anthropic hired Sunak as a senior advisor last October, paying him with equity in the AI firm. The register shows the shares were worth £373,000, or $495,000, when his one-year contract began.
Working an estimated 70 hours a year, that translates to about $7,000 an hour.
Also last October, Sunak started advising Microsoft. The tech giant paid him £741,735 a year, or almost $1 million. For an estimated 96 hours of work, per the register, that works out to about $10,200 an hour.
Sunak's role with Goldman is the most lucrative. He was paid nearly £1.1 million a year, or about $1.5 million.
The register shows the role involves an estimated 175 hours of work a year, suggesting he earns about $8,300 an hour.
Alongside his work in tech, Sunak writes a column for The Sunday Times. He also donates this money to charity, but it pales in comparison to the income from his other jobs. The register shows he earns £28,500 a quarter for five hours of work a week — about $580 an hour.
Sunak's office did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Anthropic engineering manager Felix Rieseberg says coding tests are obsolete in the AI era.
Utku Ucrak/Anadolu via Getty Images
An Anthropic manager says Claude has made traditional coding interviews a poor hiring signal.
His advice to juniors: target business problems and build a focused prototype over a weekend.
Google and Amazon are also reshaping engineering work and hiring around AI fluency and impact.
Out with the coding test, in with Claude.
That's the shift Felix Rieseberg, an Anthropic engineering manager, says he has made to his team's hiring process, arguing that AI has rendered traditional coding interviews a poor measure of who will succeed at work.
"The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic," Rieseberg wrote in a Tuesday post on X. "I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal."
Rieseberg elaborated in a blog post, writing that there's "no point" in giving candidates coding challenges or asking them about programming languages like assembly.
"Claude is now better at both," he said of the company's own AI model.
Coding challenges were once a "weak but useful" predictor of success, Rieseberg said, but the most impactful builders on his teams are not necessarily the people who excel at such tests.
"I'm seeing engineers who are comparatively new fly past people who are probably better coders and have been around much longer," he wrote. "Hunger beats tenure."
AI is writing most of the code at Anthropic, and the shift tracks with changes underway at other Big Tech companies. Business Insider's Hugh Langley reported last week that Google is expanding pilots for software-engineering interviews that allow candidates to use Gemini to assess their AI fluency and prompting skills.
Amazon, meanwhile, told engineers on Tuesday to prioritize customer and business outcomes over raw AI usage. The company calls the moment the era of the "Renaissance Developer," in which human judgment and machine intelligence combine to build products faster.
How junior engineers can stand out
The rise of AI coding tools has fueled fears that junior developer roles will become harder to get, as AI takes on work like debugging and building simple features — tasks that once helped early-career engineers learn the ropes.
In his blog, Rieseberg shared advice for junior engineers — or, more broadly, people without organizational status or power. Rather than just clearing backlog tickets, he said they should identify the business problems their company is trying to solve.
Then, they should come up with a bold idea that could materially advance those goals and build a working prototype over a weekend. The project should communicate one compelling idea, he said, rather than bury several good ones inside an overly ambitious product.
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I removed it from loops this month.
I have a spicy, optimistic take - I think there's an opportunity for junior engineers: https://t.co/PVvpQCbQtK
Newer engineers should also lean into their outsider perspective. They may be more likely to spot broken user experiences or question ingrained assumptions about what is possible, Rieseberg said.
He pointed to two relatively new Anthropic engineers who built a graphical interface for Claude Code over a weekend; the first public version shipped around eight days later.
Rieseberg said he has not yet solved the problem of how to assess candidates who build effectively with AI.
For now, he said he is scanning resumes and portfolios for small prototypes that show "taste, empathy, and principled thinking" — qualities that AI researchers and tech leaders are increasingly putting a premium on in the age of AI.
The risks laid out by the San Francisco company in its filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission range from the mundane to involvement in cyberattacks and the spread of dangerous misinformation.
Two associates of Sam Bankman-Fried invested in Anthropic. After they were sentenced for fraud, their shares entered a legal black hole.
ANGELA WEIS/Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
Sam Bankman-Fried's Anthropic stake was liquidated in bankruptcy court two years ago.
The feds seized shares belonging to two co-conspirators, Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh.
The government quietly sold those Anthropic shares last year. It's unclear where the money will go.
A little over a year ago, the federal government acquired a stake in Anthropic without paying a penny.
The shares were seized from associates of the crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. From there, they disappeared into a legal black hole.
As Anthropic rockets toward what could be the biggest IPO in history, those shares could now be worth billions of dollars.
Bankman-Fried's own Anthropic stake was liquidated in the bankruptcy of his failed cryptocurrency exchange. The Anthropic equity owned by Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh, two associates who invested alongside him, took a different path. The government seized those shares and sold them to existing Anthropic shareholders, according to a person familiar with the sale.
It's still unclear whether the proceeds will be paid out to victims of the $11 billion fraud case, or if the feds will just keep the money.
It also remains a mystery which investors bought Singh's and Ellison's stock and how much they paid, but Anthropic shares have been on such a dizzying climb that it's likely those investors made a killing on them.
Bankman-Fried was convicted in 2023 on fraud and money laundering charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison after the collapse of his cryptocurrency empire. Prosecutors said he used his crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, to siphon billions of dollars from customers of FTX, his crypto exchange.
The story of the crypto criminals' Anthropic shares is a tale with extraordinary elements, including one of the biggest financial frauds in modern history, a messy bankruptcy docket, and a company that experienced one of the fastest appreciations in business history as the world suddenly realized AI's existential importance.
An intelligent investment
Bankman-Fried, Singh, and Ellison each invested in Anthropic's 2022 Series B funding round. Bankman-Fried bought $500 million worth, which according to court records represented 13.56% of Anthropic at the time. Singh acquired $40 million in shares, and Ellison acquired $10 million in shares, court records reviewed by Business Insider show.
The Anthropic shares purchased by Singh and Ellison could together be worth between $4.17 billion and $5.03 billion today, based on the $965 billion valuation the company announced this May, according to Olav Sorenson, who teaches venture capital strategy at UCLA. Harrison Rolfes, an analyst at PitchBook, put the combined figure at $2.62 billion. If Anthropic went public at a $2 trillion valuation, the shares would be worth about $5.44 billion, Rolfes said.
Among Sam Bankman-Fried's many investments was a sizable stake in Anthropic, the AI company that has since soared in value.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Four of Bankman-Fried's close friends and executives at his companies pleaded guilty as co-conspirators. Three of them, including Singh and Ellison, testified against him.
After the collapse of FTX, Bankman-Fried's Anthropic shares — which were owned by Clifton Bay, an entity affiliated with Alameda Research — ended up in bankruptcy court along with the other dredged-up remains of his companies. His Anthropic shares were liquidated to pay FTX's creditors.
The estate in 2024 sold Bankman-Fried's Anthropic shares to a few dozen buyers for a total of $1.3 billion, more than double what he paid. The largest stake went to an entity affiliated with a United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund, bankruptcy court filings show.
The feds take a stake in Anthropic
As part of their sentences, a judge required Singh and Ellison to forfeit their Anthropic shares, which prosecutors said could be considered proceeds of their crimes.
At Singh's sentencing hearing, one of his attorneys, Andrew Goldstein, said Singh purchased his shares before participating in the criminal conspiracy and "he actually may have had a legitimate legal claim" to the shares but agreed to give them up as part of his plea agreement "because it was the right thing to do."
Reached for comment for this story, Goldstein told Business Insider that Singh hopes the government is able to quickly distribute proceeds of the sale to FTX victims. An attorney for Ellison declined to comment.
Nishad Singh was required to give up his shares of Anthropic as part of his sentence.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
A federal judge ordered Ellison's and Singh's Anthropic shares to be transferred to the federal government, which took ownership of Ellison's shares in February 2025 and Singh's in April of that year, according to previously unreported court records.
Ordinarily, victims of crimes are compensated through a restitution process, which is overseen by courts. But the number of potential FTX victims could be in the millions, prosecutors said in court filings. As a result, the judge ruled, victim compensation would be handled through a process called remission, which is overseen by the Justice Department.
During Ellison's sentencing hearing, Justice Department prosecutors told the judge that the DOJ would either set up its own claims administration process to compensate victims, or work with the FTX bankruptcy process to identify victims and provide forfeited funds to them.
At the time, FTX's bankruptcy process was in full swing. A Delaware court appointed Sullivan & Cromwell, the elite Wall Street law firm, to untangle the company's assets, figure out who was owed money, and pay them.
The creditors in the FTX bankruptcy, prosecutors noted, largely overlapped with FTX's victims. They were generally depositors, lenders, and investors who were defrauded by Bankman-Fried and other executives. Prosecutors said the Justice Department could work with the bankruptcy estate's lawyers to get money back to them, as it had in previous large-scale financial frauds such as Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
There was an unusual twist that set the FTX bankruptcy apart. Bankman-Fried's investments — especially the Anthropic shares, along with some cryptocurrency — had grown substantially in value since FTX's collapse. Earlier in 2024, the Sullivan & Cromwell lawyers who'd taken over FTX projected that all the creditors would be repaid in full, with interest.
The Marshals take control
While prosecutors said they intended to use Singh's and Ellison's Anthropic shares for remission, the Justice Department could technically do whatever it wanted with them, according to Duncan Levin, a white-collar defense attorney who teaches a course on forfeiture at Harvard Law School.
"It's a very opaque process," he said. "It's completely at the discretion, by law, of the attorney general of the United States."
Typically, when the feds seize shares of private companies through criminal asset forfeiture, they send the shares to the US Marshals Service Complex Assets Unit for liquidation. The unit tries to value the shares as any other investor would, said Michael Bachner, a white-collar criminal and securities litigation attorney.
"They may look to: What would an institutional purchaser pay for these securities?" Bachner said. "Are there funds that are valuing the securities? Is there a secondary market already out there?"
For the sale of the Anthropic shares, timing was crucial. The Marshals Service is supposed to preserve as much value as possible, Bachner said. By the time the feds got hold of the shares, Anthropic had become an economy-shifting AI giant. In its March 2025 Series E fundraising round, Anthropic was worth $61.5 billion. By its Series G round at the start of 2026, it was worth $380 billion.
At the same time, each fundraising round diluted the Series B shares. The FTX estate told the bankruptcy court that Bankman-Fried's shares, which in 2022 represented 13.56% of Anthropic, represented 7.84% of the AI company in January 2024.
Sunil Kavuri, a victim of Sam Bankman-Fried who has advocated for FTX creditors, said it would be "diabolical" for the government to hold onto the proceeds.
David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
The Marshals Service sold Singh's and Ellison's shares to existing Anthropic investors sometime last year, according to the person with knowledge of the sale.
It's not clear when exactly the agency sold the shares, to which investors, how those investors were chosen, at what price the shares were sold, or how much money the government made in the sale. Depending on when they were sold in 2025, the combined shares could have been worth between $300 million and $1.1 billion, according to Sorenson, the UCLA professor. Rolfes, the PitchBook analyst, estimated a range between $250 million and $630 million, depending on the timing.
The Marshals Service declined to comment. A representative for the Justice Department said information about asset sales and victim compensation is confidential.
The revenue from the sale of Singh's and Ellison's Anthropic shares doesn't appear to have been transferred to the FTX estate as of the end of June this year, according to bankruptcy court filings from the estate, which continues to compensate victims and creditors.
The FTX estate received $638 million last year from assets seized by the Justice Department, according to the estate's annual report for 2025. It's not clear from the filings where those funds came from. The estate expects to receive about $400 million more from the government at some point in the future, according to the annual report. That would include proceeds from cryptocurrency and other investments made by Bankman-Fried.
One of Bankman-Fried's victims, Sunil Kavuri, told Business Insider that the Justice Department should use the proceeds of Ellison's and Singh's Anthropic shares to compensate victims. It would be "diabolical" for the government to hold onto the proceeds, he said.
Victims haven't actually been made whole, he said, because the bankruptcy court calculated the losses of FTX depositors using the time of FTX's bankruptcy declaration, when crypto prices were at a low ebb. Kavuri previously argued in bankruptcy court that the FTX estate should have held on to its Anthropic shares for longer to take advantage of the company's swift growth.
Representatives for the FTX estate declined to comment. The Justice Department spokesperson said the matter was ongoing, and that the DOJ "prioritizes victim compensation from forfeiture and takes all steps to ensure forfeited funds are provided to victims."
The government could end up just keeping the money, Bachner said.
"They've invested millions and millions and millions of dollars in prosecuting Bankman-Fried. And they want to get at least reimbursed for their costs, so sometimes they'll do that," he said. "It's really a unilateral government decision."
Jack Newsham and Katie Roof contributed reporting for this story.
Correction: August 31, 2026 — An earlier version of this story misstated the number of co-conspirators who testified against Sam Bankman-Fried. It was three.
Update: August 31, 2026 — This story has been updated to reflect Singh's role in the FTX fraud case.
Correction: October 27, 2026 — FTX bankruptcy court filings don't make clear where the Justice Department obtained the $638 million it transferred to the estate. A previous version of this story mischaracterized the filings.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is among the cofounders who can propose a confidential list of successors to inherit their power and membership in the Founders LLC, which has voting control.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Anthropic's IPO paperwork shows the AI giant has some unusual approaches to governance.
One of those is an agreement with a separate entity, Anthropic Founders LLC, controlled by seven of its cofounders.
Those seven cofounders, including CEO Dario Amodei, can submit a secret list of successors to inherit their voting power.
Anthropic has devised an unusual way for its founders to pass on their power.
In its IPO filings, Anthropic outlined how seven of its cofounders, who collectively have 50.1% of voting control, will be able to create a ranked list of who they'd like to inherit their power in the event of their death or incapacitation.
What's particularly notable is that while the names would be shared with the other LLC members and Anthropic's Nominating Committee, they are otherwise contractually confidential and generally not public.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Anthropic President Daniela Amodei, and the five other LLC members will review and vote on whether to approve their fellow founders' proposed successors, but the names will likely never be seen by other shareholders. (The agreement allows for the publication only in narrow circumstances, such as a court order or other legal requirement.)
Under the agreement, which was first highlighted by Forbes, each member of the Founders LLC may name up to 10 potential successors, ranked in order of preference. The other LLC members must then vote to approve the secret lists.
While succession plans are not unusual, Anthropic's approach is unusual in how it ranks potential successors. It also underscores how, thanks to the Founders LLC, Anthropic's leaders will be able to maintain control as shareholders begin to offer input post-IPO.
Facebook's 2012 IPO paperwork suggested that if Mark Zuckerberg were in control of the company at the time of his death, then control could be transferred to someone he designated. (Meta has since tweaked this plan.) In 2020, Airbnb's three cofounders agreed to transfer their voting power to their other cofounders if one of them died or became disabled, but that arrangement (which still exists) only lasts for nine months.
The succession plan does not establish CEO succession. Anthropic's board of directors would handle such a chief executive appointment.
There are also some limitations to who the Anthropic founders can name on their lists.
Eight of their 10 potential successors are subject to eligibility requirements, including that the person named is a current or former employee of Anthropic or one of its subsidiaries, or has worked for "a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization or a national or international organization whose primary purpose is research, education, or the promotion of public benefit." In either case, the person must have worked there for at least three years.
If the person worked for Anthropic, they must have held a specific role, such as a member of the technical staff or the company's internal think tank, or another role approved by the board and a majority of the other members. If they worked outside Anthropic, they must have held a senior role at the nonprofit. These successors must also be US citizens, have permanent residency, or have valid work authorization.
The other two names, if a founder names all 10 potential successors, are not subject to the eligibility requirements, but they must also receive the required approval.
The succession plan doesn't last forever.
Under the agreement, a successor member generally would cease to be a member on the 10th anniversary of Anthropic's IPO. After that point, successor designees may be admitted only in limited circumstances during a transition period.
Dario and Daniela Amodei broke down how they manage having seven cofounders.
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Dario and Daniela Amodei said trust is key to operating Anthropic with seven cofounders.
Operating with honesty and in good faith makes it easier to disagree, Dario Amodei said.
Anthropic's S-1 filing outlined how the cofounders will steer the company after it goes public.
Many people told Dario and Daniela Amodei that starting Anthropic with seven cofounders was a terrible idea.
Yet, more than five years later, the duo said that setup is crucial to their success. The siblings made the comments in an episode of the podcast The Builders, released on Tuesday and recorded in July.
"They all have equal stakes in the company, and they all carry the vision. We have inherent trust in all of them," Dario Amodei, the CEO, said.
He said later in the episode that mutual trust is crucial to resolving his frequent disagreements with other cofounders on high-stakes questions, like what safeguards to apply to a model and how to lobby for regulations.
"These are all good-faith disagreements, but they always get resolved because there's always trust that everyone is trying to get to the right answer and everyone is being honest," he said, drawing a contrast to what he said was his previous experience working at OpenAI.
Daniela Amodei, Anthropic's president, said the focus on honesty also extends to how the leaders communicate with employees.
"Honesty and integrity and how we treat each other and our employees is also reflective of how we want the technology to be built," she said.
Under a unique governance structure, as outlined in the S-1, the company's seven founders will control 50.1% of all shareholder votes, meaning the seven cofounders will have more voting power than all other shareholders combined. In addition to their voting power, the cofounders also hold significant stakes in the company and stand to earn billions. Each of the cofounders has pledged to donate 80% of their personal equity in the company to philanthropy.
Anthropic's highly anticipated S-1 paperwork also revealed key financial statistics: The company had a net loss of $42 billion and revenue of $4.6 billion last year, five customers drove around a quarter of revenue in the first nine months of the year, and the Amodeis together had total compensation packages valued at around $35 million last year. More than 90 pages of the S-1 outline risk factors, and Anthropic warned that a "catastrophic AI-related incident" could overwhelm the entire insurance industry.
The AI behemoth is expected to target a $1.5 to $2 trillion valuation when it debuts on the Nasdaq in November, potentially making it the largest IPO ever. Some investing experts have expressed concern that the market may struggle to absorb another blockbuster IPO.
Michael Burry, the investor of "The Big Short" fame.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
"The Big Short" investor Michael Burry says Anthropic's IPO filing has fueled his worries about AI.
Burry said a dense web of AI deals has made the industry "catastrophically vulnerable."
Writing on Substack, Burry described AI financing arrangements as "garish and audacious."
Michael Burry says Anthropic's IPO filing this week has reinforced his concerns that the entire AI ecosystem is at risk of disaster.
The investor of "The Big Short" fame wrote in a Substack post on Tuesday that the first in-depth look at Claude's parent company, ahead of what could be the biggest IPO in history, threw up a bunch of red flags.
Burry pointed to Anthropic's huge spending commitments, slowing revenue, and tangled ties.
He said that Anthropic has struck deals to buy about $537 billion of compute from the likes of Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft, and reached preliminary agreements worth hundreds of billions more with others such as SpaceXAI, putting its total commitments at about 12 times its current annual run-rate revenue.
"This is not stated clearly in the S-1, and in my view it is the most deserved headline from it," Burry wrote in a Tuesday Substack post.
He underscored how hyperscalers like Amazon and Alphabet act as Anthropic's "lenders, vendors, channel providers, and shareholders." He also outlined its deal with Broadcom, which involves Apollo and Blackstone and includes convertible notes and structured credit tranches.
"Just remember, the reason this is so complex is because too much debt is needed, and it must be unloaded from the balance sheets of those involved," Burry wrote.
"While some may see all the circularity and connectedness as security on the way up, and that is not wrong, it does leave the entire organism catastrophically vulnerable either on a pause or on the way down," he added.
He also described financing arrangements in the AI space as "garish and audacious," and said hyperscalers aren't generating enough cash to fund the AI buildout so they're resorting to "Byzantine" deals.
Burry said it was a "very similar" situation with vendor financing during the dot-com bubble, saying "people keep making the same mistakes with every new thing."
Burry's worries
In its filing, Anthropic said its revenue surpassed $16 billion for the first six months of this year, a 14-fold increase from the first half of 2025. Its operating loss narrowed by about two-thirds to below $700 million, and it generated nearly $4 billion in operating cash flow.
Burry initially commented on Anthropic's filing in a Substack chat thread on Monday.
He said that revenue was "slowing," citing Anthropic's claim that third-quarter revenue was 86 times the $197 million it generated in the fourth quarter of 2024, or about $16.9 billion.
That would mean Anthropic's revenue grew by about 46% between the second and third quarters of this year, after soaring 144% between the first and second quarters.
"Overall slowing of growth is not attributed to a decline in tokenmaxxing, but I did not expect that to be mentioned," Burry wrote.
Michael Burry raised concerns about Anthropic's growth in a Substack comment.
Substack/Cassandra Unchained
Burry was referring to the trend of maximizing AI token consumption, which has fallen out of favor in recent months given its costs.
In another comment, Burry wrote that large language models (LLMs) like Claude are "improving" and "already being used more efficiently and that trend will continue, to the detriment of their growth rate."
Burry said he's focused on the complexity and fragility of the debt financing many AI deals, hurdles to installing new graphics chips shoring up demand for older chips, a potential crash in memory chip prices once the shortage eases, compression and small language models (SLMs) reducing the need for computing power, and the "fundamentals behind not just companies but the deals they are doing."
Michael Burry laid out his chief concerns about LLMs.
Substack/Cassandra Unchained
Responding to a subscriber who said that Big Tech companies are shifting from Anthropic's AI models to their own, and that tokens are rapidly being commoditized, Burry wrote: "Yes, that is what I hear."
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Burry's posts.
The contrarian investor shot to fame after his massive wager against the mid-2000s housing bubble was chronicled in the book and movie "The Big Short." He pivoted from running a hedge fund to writing about his personal investments on Substack last winter.
A recurring theme of his work since then has been deep skepticism of the AI boom. He's flagged slowing growth, overinvestment in microchips and data centers, aggressive accounting, hidden liabilities, and circular financing deals.
Posters on a wall at Anthropic's developer conference in San Francisco.
Alistair Barr/Business Insider
Anthropic shows strong profit potential, with revenue growing way faster than expenses.
Anthropic's revenue per employee exceeds $6.6 million, outpacing estimates for Meta and Google.
Anthropic has a surprisingly diverse customer base and huge cash reserves.
For years, one of the biggest unanswered questions about the artificial intelligence boom has been surprisingly simple: Can the companies building the world's most powerful AI models actually make money?
After spending hours poring over Anthropic's IPO filing on Monday, we finally have an answer: Yes. And potentially lots of it.
A couple of Chinese AI labs went public earlier, revealing appalling financial results that sowed doubt about the industry's economics. Now Anthropic has provided a much more compelling demonstration of how this business can work at enormous scale.
The numbers are remarkable. Anthropic generated $11.6 billion in revenue during the second quarter of 2026, up 1,368% from a year earlier. During that same period, spending on computing and infrastructure increased 300%, while other expenses rose 741%
So, the company is bringing in money much faster than its most importantcosts are rising.
For every dollar Anthropic spent on computing in the second quarter, it generated $2.08 in revenue, up from just 40 cents in the first quarter of 2025. That's a more than fivefold improvement over five quarters.
The result: Anthropic recorded $974 million in quarterly operating profit, representing an8% margin. Its adjusted operating profit margin reached 19%, compared with -129% a year earlier.
"Frontier-lab unit economics can turn positive at scale," Mark Mahaney, a top tech analyst at Evercore ISI, wrote in a research note on Monday.
Better than Meta and Google
There's more evidence that Anthropic has built an unusually efficient business.
Over the year ending September 30, revenue increased roughly 1,200%, while its employee count grew about 170%. Revenue per employee jumped from $1.4 million to more than $6.6 million.
For comparison, Mahaney estimated that Meta generates about $3.2 million in annual revenue per employee, while Google generates about $2.5 million.
That comparison isn't perfect. Anthropic relies heavily on cloud providers, whose employees handle much of the computing infrastructure and distribution work. The improvement is still striking.
Customer surprise
Another surprise: Anthropic doesn't depend as much on a handful of enormous customers, as some investors had feared.
The company had more than 11,900 customers generating at least $100,000 in annual revenue as of September, compared with over 950 a year earlier. More than 1,900 customers spend at least $1 million annually.
No single customer accounted for more than 10% of revenue during the first nine months of 2026. Its five largest customers represented about 21% of third-quarter revenue, down from roughly 36% in the first quarter.
"Concentration may be better than feared," Mahaney wrote.
Cash cushion
Anthropic has a formidable financial cushion. Its June 30 balance sheet showed more than $130 billion in cash and short-term investments.
And Mahaney estimated that the company has burned through just $9 billion since it started more than five years ago. That's a long runway.
Now, don't ask me whether all this makes Anthropic worth $2 trillion, $1.5 trillion, $1 trillion, or considerably less. If I knew that, I'd be making a lot more money as an investor. And even professional investors don't know.
An $800 billion caveat
Some enormous caveats: Much of Anthropic's revenue comes from customers paying for what they use, rather than signing long-term contracts. Meanwhile, some of its computing agreements require minimum payments whether or not it needs all the capacity.
Mahaney estimates that Anthropic has entered into nearly $800 billion in computing arrangements, although only about $266 billion was fixed or guaranteed as of June.
That's still a staggering amount.
"The commitments assume revenue compounding that is not contracted," Mahaney wrote.
Translation: While the company has committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI computing infrastructure, it hasn't secured the future revenue needed to pay for all of it.
Importantly, most of the potential $800 billion exposure isn't fixed. Many arrangements depend on capacity being delivered, can be adjusted, or include cancellation provisions.
In-house compute and capex
Another wrinkle: Anthropic warned Monday that its spending will increase as it shifts toward leasing AI chips and operating more of its own computing infrastructure, rather than relying entirely on Amazon, Google, and other cloud providers.
That could make future cash flow considerably less attractive, even if operating profits continue to improve.
Still, the central takeaway from Anthropic's IPO filing is difficult to ignore.
For years, investors have wondered whether selling AI could become a genuinely profitable business, rather than an extraordinarily expensive scientific experiment.
Anthropic has now shown that it can. The next question is whether it can keep doing so as the bills get much, much bigger.
Empresa norte-americana de IA vai entrar em bolsa, mas investidores não terão poder de decisão: quem comprar ações tem de aceitar qualquer rumo que a Anthropic seguir. A Anthropic prepara-se para entrar em bolsa nas próximas semanas, mas os novos acionistas terão pouca (ou nenhuma) influência sobre as decisões da empresa. O controlo da gigante da inteligência artificial continuará concentrado num pequeno grupo de fundadores e num fundo fiduciário, segundo o documento S-1 divulgado pela empresa e apresentado à Comissão de Valores Mobiliários dos Estados Unidos (SEC) antes de lançada uma Oferta Pública Inicial (IPO). Sete fundadores, incluindo o diretor-executivo
Sam Bankman-Fried and two of his co-conspirators held investments in Anthropic, the AI company that has since soared in value.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
The feds seized Anthropic shares last year from Sam Bankman-Fried's associates.
Several months later, the government sold them for $627 million.
If Anthropic IPO'd in November at $1.5 trillion, those shares would be worth nearly $4 billion.
Last year, the federal government made a windfall of $627 million when it sold Anthropic shares it had seized from associates of crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.
If it had held on to that stake, its windfall could have been a lot bigger.
The federal government last year sold shares of Anthropic that had belonged to Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh, two co-conspirators in the FTX fraud case. The proceeds went to compensate victims of the fraud, a Justice Department spokesperson told Business Insider.
Anthropic's S-1 filing on Monday revealed how much the federal government made from the sale of those shares. The prospectus doesn't name Ellison and Singh specifically. It says the government in October 2025 sold 4,453,900 Series B shares of Anthropic that "had been forfeited by former holders in legal proceedings to which we were not a party."
The figure matches up exactly with the combined $50 million in shares that Singh and Ellison purchased for $11.2261 each in Anthropic's 2022 fundraising round, and later forfeited to the government.
The shares represent about a quarter of a percent of Anthropic today. But given the company's explosive growth, they are still worth a fortune.
Anthropic hasn't yet announced the stock price for its expected November initial public offering. At a $1.5 trillion valuation, the shares would be worth a total of about $3.94 billion. That would be six times as much as the government sold the shares for a year ago.
"One of the Justice Department's top priorities is returning forfeited funds to victims through the asset forfeiture program whenever the law allows," the DOJ spokesperson said.
The feds' stake in Anthropic
How the federal government came to own a chunk of Anthropic in the first place is a story involving a notorious fraudster and a complicated criminal forfeiture process.
Bankman-Fried participated in Anthropic's 2022 Series B fundraising round with Singh and Ellison. Singh purchased $40 million of the Series B shares, and Ellison acquired $10 million.
Singh and Ellison later pleaded guilty to crimes related to their work with Bankman-Fried and testified against him at his Manhattan federal criminal trial. The jury found Bankman-Fried guilty, and a judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison. The federal government took ownership of Singh's and Ellison's Anthropic shares by April 2025.
The US Marshals Service sold Singh's and Ellison's shares, rather than hold on to the red-hot Anthropic stock, Business Insider previously reported. The US Marshals Service Complex Assets Unit is typically tasked with dispensing shares of private companies acquired through criminal forfeiture.
Now we know that Anthropic purchased the stock from the feds in October 2025 at the price of $140.9676 per share, which is the same price Anthropic set for its Series F-1 stock in a fundraising round a month earlier.
Anthropic resold the shares to nine investors at the same $627 million total price it paid to purchase them from the federal government, so it didn't make a profit from the sale, according to the S-1 filing. It's not clear which nine investors purchased the shares originally owned by Singh and Ellison. Representatives for the US Marshals Service didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Anthropic shares owned by Ellison and Singh took a different path than the $500 million in Series B shares owned by Bankman-Fried himself. His shares ended up as part of FTX's bankruptcy estate, which sold them in 2024 to a few dozen buyers for a total of $1.3 billion.
The federal government sent the proceeds from the sale of Ellison's and Singh's shares to the FTX bankruptcy estate, the Justice Department spokesperson said. Bankruptcy court filings show that the Justice Department transferred $638 million to the bankruptcy estate in late 2025.
The money has gone to repaying creditors, including FTX customers and investors who were scammed by the former crypto wunderkind.
Update: October 26, 2026 — This story has been updated to include a comment from the Justice Department.
Correction: October 27, 2026 — The federal government transferred the proceeds of the sale of Caroline Ellison's and Nishad Singh's Anthropic shares to the FTX bankruptcy estate, according to a DOJ spokesperson. An earlier version of this story misstated whether the funds had been transferred.
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