Anthropic’s IPO Gives 7 Co-Founders 50.1 Percent of Voting Power. 1 Is Left Out
Anthropic is expected to make history when it goes public. Its plan aims to keep seven key people in control of the company.
By Victoria Salves, News Writer
Dario Amodei. Photo: Getty Images
Anthropic has filed a document called an S-1 before its planned initial public offering, or IPO. The company is expected to go public at a value of $2 trillion, which could make it one of the biggest stock market debuts ever. The filing also explains how the AI company plans to keep its founders in control after its shares begin trading on the stock market.
According to the filing, the company behind the popular AI model Claude plans to create a special type of share called Class F common stock. This share will be issued to a group called Founder LLC.
The S-1 was filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. It names the seven co-founders who belong to Founder LLC: Dario Amodei, CEO; Daniela Amodei, president and chairperson; Tom Brown, chief compute officer; Jack Clark, head of the Anthropic Institute; Jared Kaplan, chief science officer; Sam McCandlish, chief architect; and Christopher Olah, head of interpretability research.
But the filing says that one co-founder, Benjamin Mann, will not be part of the Class F group. According to his LinkedIn profile, Mann leads product engineering.
“Benjamin Mann has been an important part of Anthropic since it was founded in January 2021. Because he helped establish the company, people often call him a co-founder. However, Mr. Mann will not belong to Founder LLC or be considered a Continuing Founder after this offering is completed. As a result, he will not help decide how the votes attached to our Class F common stock are used,” the filing says.
The company said it believes its founder group is “distinctly equipped to be stewards of our mission.” In other words, it believes these founders are especially suited to protect the company's goals.
The Class F share will hold 50.1 percent of Anthropic's voting power on matters generally put to shareholders for a vote. The seven people in the founder group, described as “stewards,” will decide together how to use those votes. In most cases, decisions will be made by a majority vote among the founders. Each founder will have one vote.