Anthropic Kicks Off Its IPO, and One Founders' Share Gets the Majority Vote

The Claude maker plans to sell 825 million shares as ANT; the founders' single Class F share gets 50.1% of the vote.

A share of Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, is expected to cost $70 to $78 when it lists on Nasdaq. One share held by its founders will outvote every other share combined on most questions put to stockholders.

Anthropic opened its IPO roadshow Tuesday, the company said in a post on X from @AnthropicAI and on its own site. It plans to sell 825 million Class A shares under the ticker ANT. Of those, 801,351,354 come from the company, and the other 23,648,646 belong to current stockholders, whose sales won't put money in Anthropic's pocket. At $78, the top of the range, the whole batch comes to $64.35 billion. The shares can't be sold until the SEC lets the registration take effect.

Regular investors may get a real piece of it. Quartz, citing Bloomberg, reported that Anthropic has weighed reserving about 15% to 20% of the offering for individual buyers. JPMorgan Chase is handling those buyers in the U.S., and Citigroup is running retail sales in the U.K., Canada, Japan, Australia and parts of Europe, Bloomberg reported. CEO Dario Amodei and JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon are lining up a livestream about the offering around lunchtime Friday in New York, Quartz reported, citing Bloomberg.

What those buyers get is spelled out in the amended registration statement Anthropic filed Tuesday. Each Class A share carries one vote. Right before the offering closes, Anthropic will issue a single Class F share to a company formed by its seven co-founders, among them Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei. That one share gets 50.1% of the total vote on ordinary stockholder matters, including the board seats stockholders fill. It doesn't get a cent of the profits.

Those seats are the minority of the board, though. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, which the filing says requires it to balance shareholders' money against a stated purpose: "the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity." Its Long-Term Benefit Trust is meant to be a panel of trustees with no financial stake. The trust's tool is Class T stock, which generally gives it the power to name and fire most of the board. Under Nasdaq's rules, the filing says, Anthropic is a "controlled company."

Some of the biggest new money in the deal comes with no vote at all. AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and TSMC have agreed to buy $26 billion of Class N stock at the IPO price in a private sale that closes right after the offering. Class N, the filing says, belongs mostly to strategic business partners and carries no vote unless the law demands one. Those shares also aren't bound by the underwriters' lock-up.

The price has already come down. Talk ran near $2 trillion several months ago, and a week ago investors expected about $1.5 trillion, Quartz reported, citing The Wall Street Journal. Then AI stocks sold off on Nov. 5, and several big backers pushed for less, the Journal reported. At the top of the new range, the company's fully diluted value could reach $1.405 trillion, CNBC reported, according to Quartz.

Even the paperwork wobbled. Late Monday, Anthropic emailed bankers a version showing about 866.7 million shares at $70 to $80, then sent a second email saying the pricing figures were wrong, Reuters reported, according to Quartz. A price is expected next week, Reuters reported, according to Quartz.

The business under all this is big in both directions. Anthropic's sales through Sept. 30 reached $33.24 billion, up about 1,200% from a year earlier, Quartz reported from the amended filing. Over the same nine months, it posted a $104 billion net loss, most of it from accounting changes in the value of its derivatives and convertible notes.

Whatever price the banks settle on, a buyer gets a slice of those numbers and one vote per share. The founders' single share doesn't get any of the profits. It just gets the majority.

Source: X, retrieved November 10, 2026. Other sources: anthropic.com, qz.com, the SEC, qz.com (2), qz.com (3).