Anthropic, the AI startup known for its Claude chatbot and its doomer CEO Dario Amodei, has filed for an IPO that could value the company at up to $2 trillion. The company's IPO filing devotes nearly 100 pages to the dangers its own technology could pose.
The post Hacking & Blackmail: 6 Risks Anthropic Flags in Its IPO Documents appeared first on Breitbart.
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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.
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 artificial intelligence company's valuation has soared over the past four years. On the secondary market, Anthropic has been valued at $1.5 trillion. It is the most valuable private company in the world, according to Crunchbase.
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.
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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.
Ellison was the CEO of Alameda Research, which traded and invested funds that belonged to FTX depositors. She was also Bankman-Fried's on-and-off romantic partner. Singh, an FTX executive and early employee, misrepresented the exchange's revenue to investors.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
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.
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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.
The podcast was released one day after Anthropic released its S-1 paperwork as it prepares to go public. As Henry Chandonnet wrote for Business Insider, the paperwork was chock full of language about honesty being central to the company's public persona.
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.
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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."
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.
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."
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.
O Bank of America, a Blackstone, o Citi e o Morgan Stanley anunciaram nesta segunda-feira (26) uma operação de financiamento de US$ 63 bilhões para financiar a expansão da capacidade computacional de IA (inteligência artificial) da Anthropic, utilizando a tecnologia da Broadcom.
O financiamento tem como propósito a compra de aceleradores de IA e equipamentos de rede da Broadcom que serão alugadas à Anthropic. As entregas devem começar em 2027.
Os bancos Bank of America, Citi e Morgan Stanley serão responsáveis pela parcela do financiamento com garantia prioritária, enquanto a Blackstone será a única responsável pela parcela com garantia de segundo nível.
“A necessidade de computação para IA continua a crescer em um ritmo extraordinário. Isso valida a disponibilidade de capital para financiar esse crescimento e a posição única da Broadcom em viabilizá-lo”, afirmou o CEO da Broadcom, Hock Tan.
Mais cedo, a Anthropic registrou a proposta de oferta pública primária de ações (IPO, na sigla em inglês) na Comissão de Valores Mobiliários (SEC, na sigla em inglês) nos Estados Unidos.
Alistair Barr/Business Insider
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 important costs 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 an 8% 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 $800 billion exposure isn't fixed. Many arrangements depend on capacity being delivered, can be adjusted, or include cancellation provisions.
Another wrinkle: Anthropic warned Monday that its spending will increase as it shifts toward leasing AI chips and operating more of its own computing infrastructure, rather than relying entirely on Amazon, Google, and other cloud providers.
That could make future cash flow considerably less attractive, even if operating profits continue to improve.
Still, the central takeaway from Anthropic's IPO filing is difficult to ignore.
For years, investors have wondered whether selling AI could become a genuinely profitable business, rather than an extraordinarily expensive scientific experiment.
Anthropic has now shown that it can. The next question is whether it can keep doing so as the bills get much, much bigger.
Sign up for the AI Insider newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com
A bolsa de Nova York fechou em alta nesta segunda-feira (26) à medida que os fabricantes de semicondutores se recuperaram após o pedido de IPO da Anthropic reviver o entusiasmo pelo comércio de IA (Inteligência Artificial).
O Dow Jones subiu 0,29%, aos 52.364,02 pontos. O S&P 500 avançou 0,7%, a 7.676,84 pontos. Já o Nasdaq encerrou em alta de 0,82%, nos 26.169,38 pontos.
O Nasdaq teve destaque positivo, com as ações de chips e outras relacionadas à IA subindo depois que a Anthropic apresentou publicamente seu pedido de IPO.
A empresa que desenvolveu o Claude relatou US$ 16,29 bilhões em receita para os seis meses encerrados em junho, um aumento de 1.304% em relação a US$ 1,16 bilhão durante o mesmo período do ano anterior.
Outras manchetes importantes de IA contribuíram para o sentimento de risco. A Meta informou nesta segunda que está planejando levantar US$ 95 bilhões para apoiar seus investimentos em IA.
O CEO da SpaceX, Elon Musk, disse no fim de semana que a empresa de satélites e lançamentos de foguetes fechou um acordo de dívida de US$ 40 bilhões para chips de IA.
Para analistas do Charles Schwab, os resultados podem fornecer mais evidências sobre se o investimento em IA valeu a pena após sinais positivos no segundo trimestre.
“O comércio de IA está entrando em uma fase mais exigente, com investidores examinando se os retornos futuros justificam os crescentes compromissos de capital”, afirmam.
Os semicondutores se recuperaram, com o fundo iShares Semiconductor marcando alta de mais de 2%. As ações da Nvidia subiram 2,4%, a Micron aumentou 3%, a Broadcom ganhou 2,33% e a Advanced Micro Devices saltou 2,8%.
Já as ações da Moderna caíam 0,6% ampliando a desvalorização registrada na semana passada, após os resultados de um estudo sobre uma vacina contra o câncer ficarem abaixo das expectativas dos investidores.
Veja empregos que ganham e perdem com a inteligência artificial
A Authentic Brands Group, organização que detém os direitos autorais e de imagem de Elvis Presley, acusa a Anthropic de usar 274 canções do cantor para treinar a inteligência artificial da empresa.
A instituição, a editora musical Raleigh Music Publishing, vários fundos patrimoniais e pelo menos uma pessoa física abriram um processo contra a desenvolvedora.
A ação, protocolado na Califórnia, não é a primeira contra uma companhia de IA. Gravadoras como Sony, Warner Records e Universal, e a Recording Industry Association of America, associação que representa a indústria fonográfica nos Estados Unidos, já abriram processos semelhantes, acusando empresas do setor de violação de direitos autorais.
No documento da ação, aberta na sexta-feira (23), o advogado Richard Busch alega que o Claude, principalmente modelo da Anthropic, foi projetado para usar conteúdo protegido por direitos autorais e gerar conteúdo que infringe esses direitos em “praticamente todas as músicas de todos os catálogos disponíveis na internet”.
“Os autores da ação judicial, que representam Elvis, movem este processo para fazer valer esses direitos exclusivos contra o réu, que construiu todo o seu modelo de negócios com base na violação de direitos autorais em uma escala nunca vista antes”, escreveu Busch no documento.
O processo acusa a Anthropic de utilizar 274 canções de Elvis Presley, incluindo “Can’t Help Falling in Love” e “All Shook Up”. Os detentores dos direitos pedem indenização de US$ 150 mil por faixa violada, ou cerca de US$ 41 milhões.
A ação ainda afirma que, mesmo com mecanismos de proteção para limitar a produção de conteúdos que violam direitos autorais, a Anthropic teria se envolvido “conscientemente” e continuaria a se envolver intencionalmente nesse tipo de violação.
Isso porque grandes modelos de linguagem, como o Claude, são treinados com dados disponíveis na internet. No caso das músicas, a IA aprende sons, letras e expressões que já existem para, em seguida, gerar suas próprias canções.
Em comunicado, a Anthropic afirmou que discorda das acusações e pretende se defender no processo.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
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.
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.
Pangram/BI
Anthropic's much-awaited S-1 filing landed today, revealing all sorts of interesting things about the company's plans and current finances.
But the biggest question I had wasn't "does Anthropic think that accidentally destroying humanity is a business risk?" (yes) or "how much money are they losing?" (lots) or "does it feel weird to be part of the 50% of employees who don't do the pledge to donate some of their equity for the greater good?" (still wondering — if this is you, let me know).
My question was: Did they use AI to write this thing?
To find out, I ran the whole 335-page S-1 filing through Pangram, a service that checks for signs of AI-writing. Ok, well technically I tried to run it through myself, but ran into some problems with such a massive file. I reached out to Pangram CEO and cofounder Max Spero, and he ran the full file for me.
(I also reached out to Anthropic for comment about the tool's results. I haven't heard back — I suspect it's a busy day for them.)
And before you ask me why I didn't use Anthropic's official AI watermarking system to check, it's not available to normies yet.
Here's what Pangram's result was for the full 259,031 words on the S-1 filing:
Pangram / Business Insider
Well, well, well!
So there was a tiny bit of AI use, per Pangram. It flagged some sentences and passages it said with a "high" degree of confidence contained AI use, things like: "The pace of AI development is extremely rapid, with successive versions of models emerging in compressed timeframes, often measured in months rather than years."
"My read on a result like this is that it indicates light AI editing or AI usage at the sentence level," Spero told me. "It does not seem like any significant sections of the document are fully AI-generated."
Pangram
This is one of the limitations of something like Pangram, which isn't 100% perfect, and the way that people use AI tools these days for editing and proofreading might affect results.
My colleague Aki Ito ran all her LinkedIn posts and published articles here on Business Insider through Pangram as an experiment, and ended up with a tiny surprise: one sentence in one article was flagged as AI-written. When she looked back at it, she saw that ChatGPT had suggested she rephrase her original, human-written sentence, and she accepted the new wording. (I use Grammarly, an AI-powered grammar tool that mainly helps with my repeated crimes against commas, but occasionally suggests rewording, which I sometimes accept and sometimes reject, though I worry that this may get flagged as AI).
So it would appear Anthropic still had real humans — slow, expensive, fallible meatsacks — write this massive document, with just a little assist from Claude in the editing. That might be par for the course these days for IPO teams and S-1's, or at the very least the S-1's for literal AI companies. (If you're a banker who works on S-1s, shoot me an email!)
I can't tell if I think this is a good sign or a bad sign for Anthropic (and the world)?
On one hand, shouldn't Anthropic be eating its own dog food, so to speak, and proudly use its own AI for something like this? An S-1 filing is full of the kind of boilerplate, charmless, technical-ish writing that you'd assume AI would be perfect to replace a human for. If Anthropic is going to the hassle of having real (presumably highly paid humans) write out each of the 250,000+ words here, well, where is its faith in its own product? I you can't trust Claude to write your S-1, can you trust it to cure cancer?
On the other hand, thank god this isn't 100% AI-written. The stakes are pretty high when the SEC is poring over every word. If you're going to tell people your company is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, at least have a human show up and type it out, eh?
I guess bankers everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief.
Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Spark Capital's Yasmin Razavi has a reputation for refusing to make gut calls. Her methodical decision to invest in Anthropic is now set to generate one of the biggest fortunes in Silicon Valley history, as Anthropic prepares to IPO.
Many venture firms, including Lightspeed and Menlo Ventures, are major Anthropic investors, but Spark is the only traditional VC firm named in the filing. And it's not just a few mentions. Spark is named more than 50 times.
The reason Spark gets the most ink is because Yasmin Razavi has a board seat after being the first institutional investor in the company, leading the $450 million Series C at a $4.5 billion valuation in May 2023.
This was just six months after ChatGPT was released to the public, and the jury was out on whether a rival like Anthropic could catch up. Many balked at the price, calling it too expensive.
"It was a big leap of faith, but this was the team that built GPT-3," Razavi told Forbes.
The filing says that Spark has invested $777 million in Anthropic across six financings since then, including $75 million in the first pivotal round at $11.22 per share.
Spark was already known for making early bets on Postmates and Discord, but it was the Anthropic investment that transformed the firm's Silicon Valley reputation from a good venture firm to a great one.
Razavi said she has been continuously wowed by CEO Dario Amodei.
"Every year, he puts out outrageous numbers, but somehow they magically become true," Razavi told Forbes. "Dario never misses."
Soon, Amodei will face a greater test: the public markets.
Please send along your tips. Email Ben or Katie anytime or contact them on Signal at benbergman.11 and kroof.26. Sign up for Business Insider's weekly VC Insider newsletter here.
On Wall Street, the question is no longer how much artificial intelligence will grow, but who will foot the bill. After years of market domination, tech companies have stopped being a safe bet, and the time has come to pick carefully, identifying which ones are going to fall prey to their own pharaonic investment plans and which ones are not.
© Dado Ruvic (REUTERS)
Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images
In the next few weeks, public investors will get their chance to buy a piece of Anthropic.
But regular investors will never have a chance to steer the AI giant's decisions: Even though Anthropic is going public, it will essentially remain a private company, controlled by a handful of people with outsized power.
That's not unusual for giant tech companies launched in the past few decades (Larry Page and Sergey Brin have effective control of Google; Mark Zuckerberg has the same at Meta, as does Elon Musk at SpaceX.) It's also something you see at some prominent media companies (Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan have effective control of his two public companies; Larry and David Ellison have the same at Skydance.)
Anthropic's twist on the idea is that control is split between two different groups of insiders. There's a clique of seven founders, including CEO Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela, who control 50.1% of shareholder voting power. And there's also a trust with the power to appoint four of the company's seven directors.
Put those two together, and you get a corporate constitution designed to keep public investors outside the real decisions. The founders control the outcome of any shareholder vote; the trust controls the board.
In theory, those two groups could end up in conflict on major issues. The trust-appointed directors might, say, vote to replace Amodei with a new CEO. Or the founder group could veto a sale approved by the board.
In reality, there's a lot of overlap between the two groups. For starters, Anthropic created and funds the trust. And Anthropic itself says it has made sure the trust is staffed with people who see the world the same way its executives do: "In practice to date, the Trustees and company executives have collaborated closely on sourcing, interviewing, and selecting Trustees," the company notes in its S-1 filing.
The main takeaway is that there's no way for an individual shareholder, or even institutional shareholders who own significant chunks of Anthropic's equity, to force it to move one way or another.
The upside of arrangements like this are pretty clear, from a founder's perspective: They insulate their founders and managers from investors who might only care about short-term goals.
The downside: These structures insulate founders and managers from investors who might have very good reasons to want the company to change.
A good counter-example to the trend is Twitter, which went public in 2013 without founder control — which is why Elon Musk was able to buy it nearly a decade later.
In Anthropic's case, that aversion to giving public investors a real voice is synced directly to the company's founding thesis — that the AI it is developing is so consequential and potentially dangerous, that it must be controlled by people who care about more than Anthropic's share price.
And for many investors clamoring to get in on Anthropic's IPO, that lack of control — disclosed up front — won't matter. They just want their shares to be worth more over time. Musk's ironclad control of SpaceX didn't put dampen demand for the biggest IPO in history.
But if investors ever want to force Anthropic to do something the Amodeis and their cofounders — or the Anthropic-created trust — don't want it to do, they'll be out of luck. Buyer beware.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Anthropic is ready to IPO. Analysts and onlookers are weighing in.
On Monday, the AI lab filed its hotly anticipated S-1 paperwork. The prospectus offered an inside look at Anthropic's financials: a net loss of about $42 billion in 2025 and revenue of $4.6 billion. It plans to trade under the ticker symbol ANT.
The S-1 sets the stage for a blockbuster IPO. Here's what smart people are saying about Anthropic's filing:
Big Event Media/Getty Images for HumanX Conference
Venture capitalist Sarah Guo opened her X post with a big "CONGRATS" to Anthropic on the S-1 filing.
Guo shared her first takeaways: the inflection in operating profit, the focus on novel discovery, the mismatch between consumption-based revenue and long-term compute obligations, and more.
"I am curious to see how 1) a company with strong mission changes - or doesn't - how it operates under quarterly public inspection and 2) how public opinion may change when retail owns a piece of the upside," Guo wrote.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Gary Marcus, one of the AI industry's most outspoken critics, wrote on X that Anthropic provided financial statements through June 30 — but omitted a full Q3 update.
He predicted that the company's economics had not improved, and alleged that Anthropic was "trying to skirt the truth."
Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that Anthropic told investors it generated $16.8 billion in third-quarter revenue, up 45% from the prior quarter.
Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch
Ann Bordetsky was a partner at New Enterprise Associates' technology practice before founding her own firm, Elora Capital. She wrote on X that the S-1 was a "juicy read."
The filing will set "a (high) bar for how capital markets evaluate AI startups," Bordetsky wrote.
In a note sent to Business Insider, Harrison Rolfes said Anthropic's filing shows just how fast the company is growing — and just how expensive that growth is.
His main positive highlight: the $11.6 billion in revenue in the second quarter. His big worries: the $321.4 billion in future lease payments that haven't begun yet, and the $265.6 billion in fixed minimum purchase commitments.
"The compute commitments are enormous, and the suppliers are also lenders," Rolfes wrote, pointing to financing arrangements with Google, Amazon, and Broadcom. "The price range, Q3 revenue and the total compute commitment are still blank, so the next amendment should fill in a lot."
Finally, Rolfes said it's important for investors to note that Anthropic's founders retain outsize voting power. Put plainly, "public shareholders won't control the company," he wrote.
Sam Ro, a financial journalist and former Business Insider reporter, wrote in his Substack that Anthropic's longwinded AI risk section shouldn't make investors fret.
If AI really does create an existential catastrophe, he wrote, "having money might not be your biggest concern."
He also said it's anybody's guess whether Anthropic's stock price will rise or fall after it opens on the market.
The company hasn't been consistently profitable, he said, but "a company's valuation depends less on what it earned (or lost) in the past and more on what it's expected to earn in the years to come."
Bloomberg/Getty Images
On X, Gavin Baker wrote that Anthropic's annual recurring revenue has "likely gone vertical," even after the company cut prices on its AI tokens.
"I am shocked, absolutely shocked," he wrote. "$100b plus in year-end ARR looks possible again."
Jacob Bourne, an analyst at EMARKETER, a sister company to Business Insider, wrote in an email that Anthropic's filing comes as investors are increasingly wary of debt-fueled AI infrastructure projects.
"Anthropic's decision to press ahead is particularly noteworthy given its own warnings about AI risks, signaling a willingness to face heightened public scrutiny," he wrote.
Bourne also said the S-1 comes as the cost of developing frontier models remains "eye-watering." It's all evidence that companies are turning to public markets for fresh investments "to remain at the cutting edge of AI development," he wrote.
SemiAnalysis, the research firm founded by Dylan Patel, posted the "most mind blowing stat" it had seen in the S-1. It cited Anthropic's raised capital, compared to its cash and investments.
Anthropic is "growing at a rapid pace" and "profitable on an operating income basis as of the June quarter," SemiAnalysis wrote.
"This is likely the most efficient scaling of a business in the history of capitalism," the firm wrote.
Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images
Brad Gerstner heaped his praise on Anthropic. He congratulated the team on "another important milestone!"
Altimeter will partner with Anthropic through "major participation in the IPO on top of our existing ownership," Gerstner wrote. He used an American flag and a rocket emoji.
Gerstner's venture capital firm is a longtime investor in Anthropic, co-leading the AI lab's Series H in May.
During an interview on CNBC, Matt Murphy, one of Anthropic's earliest investors, said he's increasingly bullish on the AI lab.
"You wait your entire 25-year career to find a technology wave like this," he said. "To be able to have invested in the leader early is just phenomenal."
Vivek Gopalan is an investor at 8VC, the venture capital firm cofounded by Joe Lonsdale. He posted a graph from Anthropic's S-1 showing rising revenue per dollar of compute.
"You need to believe that this is monotonic and increasing," Gopalan wrote.
Alex Broadway/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images
Dan Shipper had "big news" to share: a joke about Anthropic's ever-present safety focus. He celebrated that the S-1 "doesn't say 'or it might kill / unemploy everyone' in the first paragraph!"
The CEO of Every, an AI agent startup, called it a "win for humanity."
Dadisi Olutosin said on LinkedIn on Monday that Anthropic’s IPO filing raised a question for potential investors: “When does an extraordinary company become an overpriced investment?”
Olutosin wrote that at a reported valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, buyers would pay about 101 times the company’s trailing revenue, compared with roughly 20.5 times the revenue pace at which Series H investors bought in.
“Innovation can transform an industry,” Olutosin said. “That doesn’t make every entry price attractive.”
Noam Galai/Getty Images for Global Citizen
Sinan Aral said Anthropic’s potential valuation could make it one of the world’s most valuable companies, but that its infrastructure commitments also pose a “tremendous economic risk.”
Aral told CNBC's "Squawk Box" show on Monday that he has questions about what the AI lab’s margins and profitability would look like as it spends hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure. Aral also said there are many risks described in the company’s S-1, including the possibility that its products could act on their own.
“The question is, where is the enduring value?” Aral said. “And I think the enduring value is going to come from companies that can demonstrate enterprise profitability, productivity, and actual value add rather than just providing intelligence.”
Nick Moran wrote on LinkedIn said Anthropic’s $80.7 billion loss in the first half of 2026 was largely an accounting story.
“Anthropic lost $80 billion on paper mostly because it became more valuable,” he wrote.
Moran said the bigger question for investors is the price they’ll pay. While Anthropic’s revenue growth remained “spectacular,” Moran wrote, it slowed from the second quarter to the third as the company sought a higher valuation.
“The loss is an accounting story. The multiple is the real one,” Moran wrote. "Institutional and retail demand is real. I wouldn't be surprised to see it end up on the higher end of the range."
John Lamparski/Getty Images for Concordia Annual Summit
Brian Sozzi wrote on LinkedIn that he has three takeaways from Anthropic’s IPO prospectus: the banks leading the offering, the AI lab’s adjusted profits, and its warning about risks to humanity.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the lead underwriters and “will be cleaning up here on fees,” Sozzi wrote on LinkedIn, adding that Anthropic was profitable on an adjusted operating and net basis in the first six months of the year.
Finn Gomez/Getty Images
Venture capitalist and "All-In" podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya praised Anthropic in a brief X post after the S-1 dropped.
"Ant is an amazing business…," Palihapitiya wrote in a Monday noon X post.
The VC has previously been critical about Anthropic, advising consulting firms not to deploy Anthropic and OpenAI's products.
"If you are running a consulting business and you are deploying Anthropic or OpenAI directly into your organization (I'm looking at you PwC and Accenture) you are letting the fox into the hen house," Palihapitiya wrote on X in May.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Anish Acharya, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said his earlier predictions about Anthropic's financials have largely held true, calling it a gross-margin-positive profile and "obviously a tremendous business."
Acharya's post on Monday was a repost of a September post, in which he laid out some predictions for Anthropic.
He said in the earlier post, "Overall I think the market underweights how sophisticated anthropic has been in aligning its business interests with its technical and mission interests."
Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch
Aaron Levie, the CEO of enterprise cloud company Box, said the industry is still in the early stages of AI adoption, as most companies have not started using AI agents in full force.
As deploying agents increases token consumption, the average Fortune 500 customer's spending on Anthropic products could rise, he said in a Monday X post.
"This S-1 gives you a sense of both the strength of the frontier lab business model - even amidst massive competition - and how early we are in the build out of AI," Levie wrote.
Anthropic ha fatto ufficialmente richiesta di quotazione in borsa negli Stati Uniti, dove punta a raccogliere 100 miliardi di dollari. Una cifra astronomica, dato che Space X, a giugno, ne ha raccolti “solo” 75, più del doppio di quelli raccolti dall’ipotesi record di Saudi Aramco nel 2019. Il creatore dell’agente Ai Claude, concorrente di ChatGpt, punta dunque a un debutto storico destinato a mettere alla prova l’interesse degli investitori per il settore dell’intelligenza artificiale. Il calendario prevede l’inizio del road show per la presentazione agli investitori il 16 novembre e il debutto in Borsa del titolo il 24.
Anthropic, a giugno, aveva rivelato di aver presentato in via riservata la domanda per il collocamento negli Stati Uniti e, a fine maggio, aveva raccolto 65 miliardi di dollari con un round di finanziamento che aveva valutato la società circa mille miliardi di dollari.
Alcuni investitori potenziali valutano Anthropic a circa 1.500 miliardi di dollari, in calo rispetto ai circa 2mila miliardi ipotizzati precedentemente, dopo che la società aveva divulgato alcuni dettagli finanziari: fatturato in crescita del 45% nel terzo trimestre a 16 miliardi di dollari, in occasione di un evento dedicato agli investitori.
L’Ipo è comunque stata posticipata rispetto ai piani iniziali. Reuters aveva infatti riferito che l’inizio del road show era previsto per metà ottobre.
Anche OpenAI, che gestisce il chatbot ChatGpt, ha rivelato a giugno di aver presentato, in via riservata, una richiesta di collocamento negli Stati Uniti, ma non si quoterà prima nel 2026. L’ad e fondatore Sam Altman si è detto preoccupato circa la sicurezza dell’intelligenza artificiale, che rende “inaccettabile” l’ipotesi che l’Ai possa causare l’estinzione dell’umanità entro la fine del decennio, anche se il rischio è solo del 10%.
La società sta anche cercando di effettuare una raccolta fondi presso investitori istituzionali prima del previsto debutto in Borsa della rivale Anthropic, che potrebbe valutare, secondo Reuters, il produttore di ChatGpt oltre 1.400 miliardi di dollari.
L'articolo Anthropic, Claude vuole sbancare Wall Street: IPO da 100 miliardi nel mirino proviene da Affaritaliani.it.
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