Anthropic wants its seven co-founders to keep control of the company after it goes public. The company is asking shareholders to approve a special class of shares for them, The Information reported on Thursday. Chief executive Dario Amodei and his six co-founders would hold a combined 50.1% of the vote on most corporate matters.
The report, by Cory Weinberg, Valida Pau and Julia Hornstein, says the shareholder vote will come “in the coming days”, according to TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos. The control would last as long as at least three of the seven keep a minimum stake. Anthropic has not commented publicly on the report, and TNW has not independently verified it.
Control without the shares
The seven co-founders each own about 2% of the company, Amodei included, TechCrunch reported. The new shares would carry no extra economic value. Their only purpose would be to keep the group in charge once the stock starts trading.
The founders have also pledged to give away most of their wealth. Amodei announced it in January in an essay on the risks of AI, in a section on how AI could concentrate economic power.
“All of Anthropic’s co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of our wealth,” Amodei wrote.
“The thing to worry about is a level of wealth concentration that will break society,” he wrote in the same essay.
The plan does not hand the founders the whole board. Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust would still choose most of the directors, TechCrunch reported. The trust is the independent body Anthropic set up to oversee its mission, and it added former Fed chair Ben Bernanke in July.
The founders’ own board seats would grow from two to three. Employees would also get their own class of stock to break ties on some issues.
The Palantir model
The Information’s headline calls the structure “Palantir-style”. Palantir listed in 2020. Its founders, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen and Peter Thiel, kept voting control through Class F shares held in a voting trust. Those shares also depend on the founders keeping a minimum stake, Palantir’s prospectus says.
The Class F shares “will give these Founders the ability to control up to 49.999999% of the total voting power of our capital stock”, the prospectus says.
Super-voting shares are common among tech founders. Mark Zuckerberg keeps control of Meta that way, and Evan Spiegel does the same at Snap. SpaceX’s IPO filing showed that Elon Musk and insiders keep most of the vote there. The group approach is what sets Anthropic’s plan apart, TechCrunch noted.
Ahead of the listing
Anthropic has chosen Nasdaq for its listing. A funding round in May valued it at $965bn, TechCrunch noted. The company also expects a second straight quarter of adjusted operating profit.
If shareholders approve, the founders’ control would end only when fewer than three of them hold the minimum stake. No report has given the size of that stake.