Anthropic files for blockbuster IPO that could value AI giant at $2 trillion

Anthropic officially filed paperwork on Monday to become a public company, with a possible value of up to $2 trillion. The public stock sale could create a new group of extremely wealthy people in California.

The seven founders of the company behind Claude could each make billions of dollars from the huge initial public offering (IPO), which was announced in a filing on Monday. The company, based in San Francisco, plans to list its shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the symbol “ANT,” according to its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Anthropic did not say how much its shares would cost or how many it would sell. However, investors have recently valued the company at $1.5 trillion, Reuters reported. This is lower than the $2 trillion value mentioned in early reports about its planned stock market debut.

A value of $1.5 trillion would still make Anthropic one of the most valuable companies in the world, about as valuable as Tesla is on the stock market today.

The seven former OpenAI employees who started Anthropic in 2021 could each be worth as much as $29 billion when the company goes public. According to the IPO filing released on Monday, each founder owns about 240 million shares, now worth nearly $14 billion.

The value of their shares could double if Anthropic reaches a value of $2 trillion.

Yishai Kabaker, an accountant and tax partner at Gursey Scheider LLP, said the IPO would have a huge effect on the economy of the San Francisco Bay Area and California. He compared the possible creation of wealth to what happened when Google and Facebook went public in the early 2000s.

Kabaker said the new wealth in San Francisco could have a “ripple effect,” pushing up home prices and private school fees even more.

“All the normal markers of wealth are likely to be higher for the short to medium term, depending on whether the wealth stays around in the state.”

Kabaker warned that the huge amount of wealth created by Anthropic's IPO should not be used as a reason for California to keep increasing government spending at its current pace. State spending is now about $350 billion, 40% higher than when Gov. Gavin Newsom took office.

Here are the seven Anthropic founders who could make huge amounts of money from the IPO:

Dario Amodei

Dario Amodei, 43, helped start Anthropic in 2021 and is its CEO.

Before that, he was vice president of research at OpenAI. He left the company to start Anthropic with his sister, Daniela Amodei, with a strong focus on AI safety.

The former Stanford physicist has warned about the risk that AI could threaten humanity's future, while also working toward a public offering that could value the company at trillions of dollars.

Daniela Amodei

Daniela Amodei is Dario's younger sister and Anthropic's president.

Like her brother, she held a senior role at OpenAI before helping start Anthropic. She began her career in politics, working on a campaign in Pennsylvania and for former Democratic Representative Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania.

According to an SEC filing, Dario and Daniela Amodei each received an annual salary of $1.4 million last year.

Daniela Amodei earned a total of $16.4 million in 2025, while her brother earned $18 million.

Christopher Olah

Christopher Olah, 34, leads research at Anthropic into interpretability, which studies how AI systems work and why they produce certain results.

He has attracted attention for unusual views about whether AI might be conscious. According to The New York Times, he reportedly shared these views with religious leaders.

Olah reportedly told religious leaders that the company's chatbot, Claude, might be conscious and able to suffer, according to a report.

In May, he joined Pope Leo XIV in warning about the dangers of AI discussed in the pope's latest encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas.”

According to The New York Times, Olah nearly canceled a meeting at the Vatican in the spring after learning that the pope planned to say AI is not actually conscious.

Jack Clark

Jack Clark, 38, works on public policy at Anthropic and previously worked as a journalist.

Like Dario and Daniela Amodei, he worked at OpenAI before leaving to join Anthropic.

Clark leads the Anthropic Institute, a research group that studies how AI affects society. He oversees teams that work to help people understand “powerful AI,” according to the company's website. These teams study social effects, test the limits of advanced AI, research economic effects, measure AI progress, examine the rule of law, and work on Mission Labs.

Tom Brown

Tom Brown, 39, is Anthropic's chief compute officer. He is responsible for making sure the company's computing resources are secure and used efficiently.

Before joining Anthropic, Brown played an important role as a lead engineer in building OpenAI's GPT-3.

Brown previously lived with other Anthropic employees in a shared house for tech enthusiasts in San Francisco called Archive, The New York Times reported.

Jared Kaplan

Jared Kaplan, 42, is Anthropic's chief science officer.

Kaplan played an important role in developing “Constitutional AI.” This approach aims to build AI systems using a set of rules and values chosen in advance, according to Anthropic's website. Like Brown, he also helped develop OpenAI's GPT-3.

He studied at Harvard and Stanford and is also an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Sam McCandlish

Sam McCandlish, 36, is Anthropic's chief architect and former chief technology officer.

Before joining Anthropic, he made important contributions to AI safety at OpenAI. He also built and led a team that studied machine learning and how to make it work at larger scales, according to an Anthropic biography.