Anthropic's seven billionaire co-founders are set to gain collective control over one of the world's biggest companies following its blockbuster listing, testing whether shared beliefs and personal bonds can withstand the pressures of the public market. The AI lab issued its IPO prospectus on Monday, revealing that seven executives (chief executive Dario Amodei, president Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Christopher Olah) will together gain a special class of stock granting them 50.1 per cent of the voting power.
The move means ordinary shareholders will have virtually no control over Anthropic's decisions. Instead, investors must bet on a group described as "stewards of our mission" in the S-1 prospectus. The document pointed to the "uncommon" retention of all seven, a subtle critique of OpenAI, where most co-founders have left. Jenny Xiao, a former OpenAI researcher and partner at Leonis Capital, called the team's unified vision "pretty rare among frontier AI labs" and said it was reassuring for investors.
Their stakes were estimated to be worth up to $15.5bn each after Anthropic's last fundraising valued the company at $965bn in May. All seven have pledged to donate 80 per cent of their wealth to charity.
The co-founders were colleagues at OpenAI until December 2020, when they quit to start their own lab. A shared belief drove them: AI systems were scaling rapidly, and rolling them out required a more responsible path. Amodei reportedly told an early company meeting, "Things are never going to be chill again." The idea to split off was first suggested by Kaplan, a friend from graduate school.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing