• Sam Bankman-Fried's Anthropic stake was liquidated in bankruptcy court two years ago.
• The feds seized shares belonging to two co-conspirators, Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh.
• The government quietly sold those Anthropic shares last year. It's unclear where the money will go.

A little over a year ago, the federal government acquired a stake in Anthropic without paying a penny.

The shares were seized from associates of the crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. From there, they disappeared into a legal black hole.

As Anthropic rockets toward what could be the biggest IPO in history, those shares could now be worth billions of dollars.

Bankman-Fried's own Anthropic stake was liquidated in the bankruptcy of his failed cryptocurrency exchange. The Anthropic equity owned by Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh, two associates who invested alongside him, took a different path. The government seized those shares and sold them to existing Anthropic shareholders, according to a person familiar with the sale.

It's still unclear whether the proceeds will be paid out to victims of the $11 billion fraud case, or if the feds will just keep the money.

It also remains a mystery which investors bought Singh's and Ellison's stock and how much they paid, but Anthropic shares have been on such a dizzying climb that it's likely those investors made a killing on them.

Bankman-Fried was convicted in 2023 on fraud and money laundering charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison after the collapse of his cryptocurrency empire. Prosecutors said he used his crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, to siphon billions of dollars from customers of FTX, his crypto exchange.

The story of the crypto criminals' Anthropic shares is a tale with extraordinary elements, including one of the biggest financial frauds in modern history, a messy bankruptcy docket, and a company that experienced one of the fastest appreciations in business history as the world suddenly realized AI's existential importance.

An intelligent investment

Bankman-Fried, Singh, and Ellison each invested in Anthropic's 2022 Series B funding round. Bankman-Fried bought $500 million worth, which according to court records represented 13.56% of Anthropic at the time. Singh acquired $40 million in shares, and Ellison acquired $10 million in shares, court records reviewed by Business Insider show.

The 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.

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.

The feds take a stake in Anthropic

As part of their sentences, a judge required Singh and Ellison to forfeit their Anthropic shares, which prosecutors said could be considered proceeds of their crimes.

At Singh's sentencing hearing, one of his attorneys, Andrew Goldstein, said Singh purchased his shares before participating in the criminal conspiracy and "he actually may have had a legitimate legal claim" to the shares but agreed to give them up as part of his plea agreement "because it was the right thing to do."

Reached for comment for this story, Goldstein told Business Insider that Singh hopes the government is able to quickly distribute proceeds of the sale to FTX victims. An attorney for Ellison declined to comment.

A federal judge ordered Ellison's and Singh's Anthropic shares to be transferred to the federal government, which took ownership of Ellison's shares in February 2025 and Singh's in April of that year, according to previously unreported court records.

Ordinarily, victims of crimes are compensated through a restitution process, which is overseen by courts. But the number of potential FTX victims could be in the millions, prosecutors said in court filings. As a result, the judge ruled, victim compensation would be handled through a process called remission, which is overseen by the Justice Department.

During Ellison's sentencing hearing, Justice Department prosecutors told the judge that the DOJ would either set up its own claims administration process to compensate victims, or work with the FTX bankruptcy process to identify victims and provide forfeited funds to them.

At the time, FTX's bankruptcy process was in full swing. A Delaware court appointed Sullivan & Cromwell, the elite Wall Street law firm, to untangle the company's assets, figure out who was owed money, and pay them.

The creditors in the FTX bankruptcy, prosecutors noted, largely overlapped with FTX's victims. They were generally depositors, lenders, and investors who were defrauded by Bankman-Fried and other executives. Prosecutors said the Justice Department could work with the bankruptcy estate's lawyers to get money back to them, as it had in previous large-scale financial frauds such as Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

There was an unusual twist that set the FTX bankruptcy apart. Bankman-Fried's investments — especially the Anthropic shares, along with some cryptocurrency — had grown substantially in value since FTX's collapse. Earlier in 2024, the Sullivan & Cromwell lawyers who'd taken over FTX projected that all the creditors would be repaid in full, with interest.

The Marshals take control

While prosecutors said they intended to use Singh's and Ellison's Anthropic shares for remission, the Justice Department could technically do whatever it wanted with them, according to Duncan Levin, a white-collar defense attorney who teaches a course on forfeiture at Harvard Law School.

"It's a very opaque process," he said. "It's completely at the discretion, by law, of the attorney general of the United States."

Typically, when the feds seize shares of private companies through criminal asset forfeiture, they send the shares to the US Marshals Service Complex Assets Unit for liquidation. The unit tries to value the shares as any other investor would, said Michael Bachner, a white-collar criminal and securities litigation attorney.

"They may look to: What would an institutional purchaser pay for these securities?" Bachner said. "Are there funds that are valuing the securities? Is there a secondary market already out there?"

For the sale of the Anthropic shares, timing was crucial. The Marshals Service is supposed to preserve as much value as possible, Bachner said. By the time the feds got hold of the shares, Anthropic had become an economy-shifting AI giant. In its March 2025 Series E fundraising round, Anthropic was worth $61.5 billion. By its Series G round at the start of 2026, it was worth $380 billion.

At the same time, each fundraising round diluted the Series B shares. The FTX estate told the bankruptcy court that Bankman-Fried's shares, which in 2022 represented 13.56% of Anthropic, represented 7.84% of the AI company in January 2024.

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.

• Machenta raised $40 million in seed funding led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures.
• It says robots can learn tasks from one demo using a model trained entirely in simulation.
• The startup remains focused on research as it takes on multibillion-dollar rivals.

A London-based robotics startup is betting it can teach robots new tricks without collecting the mountains of real-world data its much bigger rivals are chasing.

Machenta, founded by researchers from Imperial College London, has raised a $40 million seed round to build an AI model that can teach robots new physical tasks after seeing them performed just once, the company exclusively told Business Insider. Venture capital firms Creandum and Union Square Ventures co-led the round. Machenta declined to disclose its valuation.

While rivals building general-purpose AI models for robots are scrambling to amass real-world data, Machenta is taking a contrarian approach. Edward Johns, the startup's CEO and cofounder, and an Imperial professor, said the company trains its model in computer-generated environments that mimic how objects move and interact, without using a "single pixel of real-world data."

Once trained, the model can direct a robot to perform a new task, such as tidying a table or putting objects into a box, after watching it done just once, without further training, Johns said. In a video shared with Business Insider, three robots pack and close a box on an assembly line, a task Johns said they learned this way.

The startup has 11 employees and remains focused on research, with no near-term plans to commercialize its technology. Its model can learn some tasks immediately, but more precise tasks and complex movements remain challenging.

Machenta faces rivals with multibillion-dollar valuations in one of robotics' most competitive and well-funded fields. Its California-based competitors include Physical Intelligence, valued at roughly $11 billion, and FieldAI, which is raising funding at a $10 billion valuation, Business Insider reported this month.

Another rival, Skild AI, which is valued at over $14 billion, is already selling technology with similar capabilities. In August, Skild unveiled a model that it said could perform previously unseen tasks lasting up to 10 minutes after a single video demonstration. Last month, it said that it had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue from more than 60 customers.

From research lab to startup

Six years ago, Johns began investigating whether robots could learn new physical tasks as quickly as humans at his Imperial College lab.

In the lab's early experiments, researchers physically guided a robot through a task, such as picking up a spatula and scooping an object. The robot then spent about 30 minutes collecting additional data about the object and its surroundings before it could perform the task on its own.

Johns and former Ph.D. student Vitalis Vosylius spent the next few years working to eliminate that extra step, founding Machenta late last year after seeing early signs that their model could perform new tasks immediately after a demonstration.

Companies are increasingly buying and collecting data to teach robots how to interact with the real world. But Johns believes simply collecting more data isn't the answer. It also remains unclear how much training data will be needed to make general-purpose robots a reality. Johns said that Machenta is taking on the harder challenge of designing algorithms that can generate synthetic data useful for teaching robots physical tasks.

Machenta plans to use the funding to expand its team and train its model with more computing power and simulated data, hoping to teach robots to perform more precise and complex tasks.

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• Amazon launched a series of new devices this month, including Alexa tablets and Bee AI wearables.
• Rising memory costs forced "difficult trade-offs" on Amazon's device prices, sales, and profit.
• Amazon is seeking more Alexa revenue from enterprise sales, licensing, and ads.

Amazon launched a flurry of new consumer devices this month. Behind the scenes, rising memory costs are adding pressure to its already money-losing hardware business.

An internal planning document obtained by Business Insider shows Amazon forecasting a $612 million gross loss this year for its first-party devices business, compared with a leadership target of a $438 million loss.

The document said rising memory costs were "putting pressure" on the business's profitability, forcing "difficult trade-offs" among sales volumes, average selling prices, and gross profit.

The projected $612 million loss was at the gross profit level, meaning it did not account for all operating expenses, such as R&D, sales and marketing, and administrative costs.

The figures offer a rare glimpse into the pressure on Amazon's hardware business as it absorbs rising component costs. Other tech hardware companies, including industry leader Apple, face similar pressure from surging memory chip prices.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment.

A new wave of AI devices

Despite the pressure, Amazon continues to expand its consumer hardware lineup. Even if the company loses money on device sales, it can make money in other ways, such as subscription services, as more customers use its gadgets.

In October alone, the company introduced new Kindles, Alexa-powered tablets, Ring smart locks, and AI wearables under its Bee brand. The August planning document identified Bee and new smart glasses as strategic products still in an investment phase.

Amazon has historically used low-cost hardware to pull customers into a broader ecosystem of shopping and digital content. Rising component costs could make that strategy more expensive, forcing the company to raise prices.

The clearest shift is in Amazon's tablets. Earlier this month, the company phased out Fire tablets after 15 years and replaced the budget-friendly lineup with pricier Alexa Tablets powered by Alexa+. The new devices cost between $229.99 and $499.99, a notable increase from previous generations.

Not just Amazon

The planning document was prepared in August, the same month Amazon raised prices on products including Echo speakers, Kindle e-readers, and Fire TV devices.

The pressure extends beyond Amazon. Apple has raised prices on some Macs and iPads, while Microsoft and Sony have increased console prices. Dell, HP, and Lenovo also face higher memory costs.

The AI boom is helping drive the squeeze. Huge data center investments have increased demand for memory chips, while manufacturers have devoted more capacity to high-bandwidth memory used in AI servers. That has tightened supplies and raised prices for components used across consumer electronics.

Amazon is experiencing both sides of the boom. It expects roughly $220 billion in capital expenditures this year, largely to expand AWS data centers for AI demand, while higher component costs squeeze its consumer hardware business.

The rising cost of Alexa+

The August planning materials show Amazon reassessing both Alexa+ revenue and operating costs. They called for updated forecasts, expansion through enterprise sales and advertising, and more detailed AWS cost modeling.

Amazon is now confronting the cost of operating Alexa+ at scale. Business Insider reported in July that internal forecasts put Alexa+'s AWS cloud costs at roughly $1.7 billion in 2026, nearly triple the prior year's figure. Amazon was working to lower those costs by relying less on Anthropic's AI models and routing more requests to its own, cheaper systems.

A separate project called Moonraker, intended to give Alexa more advanced AI-agent capabilities, was projected to require more than $100 million in GPU spending this year. Amazon internally considered delaying or scaling back the initiative as one option for easing cost pressure, Business Insider previously reported.

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Trump’s relentless campaign schedule in the home stretch before the midterm elections is something the White House says gives Republicans their best shot at emerging victorious.

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