• 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 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.

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.

The maker of miracles may no longer be God, but it does rhyme with him. 

Anthropic, creator of Claude, filed its S-1 paperwork on Monday in preparation for a gargantuan initial public offering. The document runs over 300 pages and spans more than 240,000 words, some 50,000 more than the New Testament. It asks potential investors to prioritize mission over money: "Mission" appears 79 times, while "money" — the thing an S-1 is filed to generate, in this case, a bajillion dollars worth — a mere 17.

The company professes it could "bend the arc of geopolitical history toward freedom"; it could grow economies everywhere, including "the poorer parts of the world"; it could cure "diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia." Page 4 of the S-1 is not dissimilar from Jesus in Matthew 11: "The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them."

Anthropic aims to "bring forth an age of miracles," it writes, and the investors who buy in should be true believers. Because in the wrong hands, as you'll see if you turn your missals to page 46, AI can be built in ways that pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity."

While S-1s are definitionally visions of the future and full of hype, most are drab financial documents, eye-popping for their prospective profits more than their prose. But Anthropic didn't just open up its book; it wrote its own Good Book, a Bible-like statement of good and evil that joins a growing canon of the company's sacred texts. If you were to stumble onto any random page of this S-1, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were reading not a perfunctory government filing but the scripture of a doomsday religion.

Anthropic has long dodged allegations of fomenting a new, questionable faith. Headlines and takes on Anthropic's cultishness abound: "The Cult of Anthropic" (The Information), "Anthropic is a Cult and Claude is rapidly becoming its God" (The New York Post), "Has a cult ever started a company as successful as Anthropic?" (Peter "Beware the Antichrist" Thiel). Critics point to the employees' extinction predictions — p(doom) is not too far from p(rapture) — and ties to the effective altruism movement. It doesn't help that Dario Amodei was reportedly a Y2K prepper in high school. Anthropic has welcomed the reputation in other ways, inviting religious leaders to oversee the construction of Claude's rules.

In its S-1, Anthropic asks investors to take an actual leap of faith.

Let's play: Is that an Anthropic core value or one of God's 10 commandments?

Anthropic asks its employees to act for the "global good," be "helpful, honest, and harmless," and "hold light and shade." They shall have no other gods — as in, "put the mission first." And, just as followers must sublimate themselves to praise God, Anthropic employees must be "low-ego." The S-1 says it at least nine times.

To understand Anthropic, you'll need to understand 42 ornate terms. The S-1's glossary is sprawling, including neologisms for virtuous acts ("closing the loop") and evil deeds ("prompt injection"). Then there's "Constitutional AI," a type of large language model that is trained with goodness in mind. The SEC's "Plain English Handbook" implores companies to use "concrete, everyday words" and to avoid "relying on glossaries and defined terms." But can you truly be AGI-pilled if you don't speak of "interleaved thinking," "mechanistic interpretability," or "multi-agent orchestration"?

You use language like this because we need to be — and I say we as in society — true believers that this is going to work.James Bort

It's exceedingly hard to get a job at Anthropic, and not just because of the massive pool of cash-eyed engineers seeking IPO windfalls. The company has an intensive interview process, one it name-checks in the S-1. It looks for honesty, trust, and (you guessed it) a low ego. "We are willing to turn down candidates who don't demonstrate them, even if they are extremely strong technically," the S-1 reads. They must, in other words, be devotees through and through.

Accepted engineers become "Ants." Most tech companies have a name for their employees: Googlers, Metamates, Amazonians, Nvidians, Palantirians. Anthropic's moniker evokes the image of a collective, company as colony. In Proverbs 6:6, ants are considered diligent and prepared. Staffers may yell its teachings at their OpenAI foes: "Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!"

CEO Dario Amodei — Amodeity — leads the ants' march, along with his six apostles. These cofounders pull equal cash salaries and are "distinctly equipped to be stewards of our mission," the S-1 says. And, while the company opens itself to a broader group of believers through its forthcoming IPO, the divine cofounders will retain majority decision-making power.

Anthropic has its own form of tithing: The cofounders all made voluntary pledges of 80% of their personal equity to philanthropy. They incentivize their employees to do the same, promising to match donations.

Cult is an overused word, and many parts of Anthropic are far from cultish. Where cults are led by a liturgical leviathan that squashes the speech of their participants, Anthropic touts its culture of open dialogue. "Our teams operate in a truth-seeking environment where the best argument wins, not the loudest voice or the most senior title," the S-1 reads.

Americans' faith in the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, the military, the police, higher education, public education, news media, the medical system, and traditional organized religion are each at record- or near-record lows — and just as AI has brought on tremendous economic and social uncertainty. In that cauldron of doubt, tech founders — with their world-historic money, power, and ubiquity, and in their pursuit of it — sense an opportunity, to offer promise and purpose. As Sam Altman once said, "The most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion." They may also be trying to build devotion out of necessity, as the economy and stock market increasingly relies on AI gains.

"If these companies fail, what happens?" asked James Bort, an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at DePaul University, and coauthor of a recent research paper on "cultic startups." "You use language like this because we need to be — and I say we as in society — true believers that this is going to work."

Anthropic didn't respond to my request to know more about how it wrote the S-1. So, we asked Claude: If the S-1 is a confession of faith, what are you? I am its product, Claude said. "The word made flesh, or at least made weights."

• 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.

• Anthropic's IPO filing offers a look at a workplace where Claude does much of the coding.
• The company said it grew from 940 employees to 5,300 in less than two years.
• "Low ego" is a cultural ideal, and keeping top AI talent is a key challenge.

Anthropic is rapidly growing head count, concerned about retaining top talent, and trying to build a "low-ego" culture.

Those are among the workplace insights in the Claude maker's IPO filing released Monday.

The more than 200,000-word document reveals what it takes to thrive as an employee — or an "Ant," as staffers are called — and why the company is so focused on retaining its top talent.

Here's a look at three workplace themes in Anthropic's S-1:

Head count is booming, but could be higher without Claude

Anthropic said its workforce grew from about 940 employees at the end of 2024 to about 5,300 as of late September.

The more than fivefold spike in head count in less than two years is notable on its own. Yet, without Claude, it could have grown more. Anthropic said the tool is helping its staffers take on work that would traditionally have required much larger teams — something many tech companies are looking to do to become more nimble.

Most Anthropic employees work in research, engineering, and product development. The company said its strategy is to use Claude to grow the business "without growing head count linearly, resulting in extraordinary contributions per employee."

One place where that's evident is in software engineering. The company said these workers increasingly direct and review Claude's output rather than write code line by line. Claude wrote more than 90% of the contributions to the company's codebase in September, while average daily code contributions per engineer in the third quarter were more than 45 times their average daily level in 2024, Anthropic said.

Recruiter Martha Heller said it's little surprise to see Anthropic talking up its use of Claude. "Of course they're going to eat their own dog food," she said. In any case, Heller said, the company still needs people to provide oversight of AI's activities.

Yet the gap between staffing levels and output could grow, said Aaron Cleavinger, an executive recruiting partner at Flatiron Search Partners.

"Head count is becoming a less meaningful measure of organizational capability," he said. Cleavinger said it's not yet clear what the new measure will be, though Anthropic's approach suggests companies might put greater emphasis on workers' productivity and business impact.

It describes retention as paramount

Despite having significantly upped its employee count, Anthropic said it's highly dependent on its senior leaders and key technical team members. The company warned that their departure could disrupt operations and slow innovation.

While that's true for any employer, Anthropic faces additional challenges. It's a fast-growing startup in a booming industry, where few people have the right technical skills — and those who do are being heavily courted by competitors.

Winning the war for talent is half the battle. Anthropic is also part of an industry where some workers have quit and issued dire public warnings about the dangers of increasingly powerful AI.

For example, safety researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic last month, saying the company and his former employer, OpenAI, were moving too quickly toward increasingly powerful AI without a sufficient plan to control it.

"That's not garden-variety turnover," said Liane Davey, an advisor on team effectiveness to executives at companies such as Amazon and Google.

If employees determine that their work poses an existential threat, no bonus can simply erase moral qualms, Davey added.

In its S-1, Anthropic said many key technical workers are motivated by its mission and by the chance to tackle specific AI problems. However, if their beliefs change, or another organization seems more aligned with their personal beliefs or professional goals, "we may face increased difficulty retaining such personnel," Anthropic said.

The company's internal data suggests that, at least for now, turnover isn't a significant problem. It said it experienced only about 1% "regrettable attrition" in a 12-month period ending on September 30.

However, Anthropic may have a thinner pipeline of junior technical talent to elevate. The company said in a recently released internal report that it has been hiring for a "smaller share of junior technical positions" as AI agents have been deployed across the firm to write code, fix bugs, and handle other tasks.

Anthropic is betting on a "low-ego" workforce

Anthropic touts a "low-ego" or "ego-light" culture, meaning all employees are expected to prioritize what's best for the company over personal status, credit, or seniority. It uses similar language on its website in a section describing its values.

In the S-1, the company went further, saying the arrangement allows for an "unusually short" distance between a research insight and a released product. Anthropic also said a shared purpose, paired with low ego, translates directly into less organizational friction and greater impact per employee.

"Our teams operate in a truth-seeking environment where the best argument wins, not the loudest voice or the most senior title," Anthropic said.

Jamie Shapiro, an organizational psychologist and CEO coach, said that logic makes sense because good ideas can come from anyone within an organization, especially those who directly interact with customers.

"An organization that has idea meritocracy is going to get the best ideas," she said.

However, as Anthropic grows, the more challenging task will be ensuring its hiring, recognition, promotion, and accountability systems reinforce its ideals — rather than allowing exceptions that undermine them.

"The bigger the organization, the harder it is to make sure everyone is living and breathing the culture it wants," said Shapiro. "Culture is defined by the worst behaviors you allow."

• I set out to see if Anthropic used Claude to draft its S-1 paperwork.
• The filing is, according to the AI detector tool Pangram, 92% human-written.
• Is that a good or bad thing? I'm not even sure!

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:

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."

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.

• Spark Capital is mentioned more than 50 times in Anthropic's S-1 filing, released Monday.
• The reason Spark gets the most mentions is because partner Yasmin Razavi has a board seat.
• Spark led the $450 million Series C round at a $4.5 billion valuation in May 2023.

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.

• Public investors are finally getting a chance to invest in Anthropic.
• But unlike other public companies, Anthropic doesn't want the public's input when it comes to major decisions.
• Instead, Anthropic will be effectively controlled by CEO Dario Amodei and a group of other insiders.

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.

• Anthropic filed its S-1 on Monday, revealing the company's internal financials.
• Investors, researchers, and tech onlookers shared their thoughts.
• Some applied S-1 learnings to their own industries, like startups and venture capital.

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:

Sarah Guo, founder of Conviction

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.

Gary Marcus, emeritus professor at NYU

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.

Ann Bordetsky, founder of Elora Capital

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.

Harrison Rolfes, Senior Late-Stage Research Analyst at PitchBook

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, financial journalist and founder of TKer

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."

Gavin Baker, managing partner at Atreides Management

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, analyst at eMarketer

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

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.

Brad Gerstner, CEO of Altimeter Capital

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.

Matt Murphy, partner at Menlo Ventures

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, partner at 8VC

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.

Dan Shipper, CEO of Every

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, cofounder and CTO of DealView AI

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.”

Sinan Aral, MIT professor and cofounder of Milemark Capital

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, general partner at New Stack Ventures

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."

Brian Sozzi, executive editor of Yahoo Finance

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.

Chamath Palihapitiya, venture capitalist and "All-In" podcast co-host

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.

Anish Acharya, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz

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."

Aaron Levie, CEO and cofounder of Box

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.