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.
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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.
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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.
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