Anthropic Plans Super-Voting Rights for Founder, Accelerating Preparations for Largest-Ever IPO
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Anthropic is preparing to grant CEO Dario Amodei and six co-founders supervoting shares ahead of an IPO that could come as early as September and rank as the largest ever — a critical move given the founders' combined stake has been diluted to a minority position.
The founder holds just 2% — why does he still get supervoting power?
Dario Amodei owns roughly 2% of Anthropic, among the lowest founder-CEO stakes of any company approaching a public listing in recent decades.
The seven co-founders each hold roughly equal shares, but the company has raised tens of billions of dollars in outside capital, diluting their combined stake to a minority position.
This means → without supervoting shares, the founders would have no meaningful voting power after an IPO, leaving outside shareholders able to steer the company's direction.
What is the "Long-Term Benefit Trust," and how will it share power with the founders?
In 2023 Anthropic created a Long-Term Benefit Trust that holds a special class of T shares with no economic rights but the power to elect a majority of the seven-seat board. In plain terms = the trust gets no money, but decides who sits on the board.
Trust members include former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke. The trust is currently down to three members — former California Supreme Court Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar left this month to become Anthropic's chief global affairs officer.
The new plan would preserve the trust's existing powers while adding voting rights for the seven founders, creating a checks-and-balance dynamic. This means → Anthropic's governance is not a single "founders rule" structure but a dual-center system where the trust and the founders constrain each other.
How big could this IPO be?
The IPO could come as early as September and may be the largest in history, according to the report.
If it proceeds, Anthropic would become the most valuable U.S. public benefit corporation by a wide margin, dwarfing the current No. 2, software firm Veeva Systems, valued at roughly $40 billion.
This reflects how AI-sector valuations have blown past the traditional IPO ceiling for tech companies.
Zuckerberg and Musk both did this — what makes Anthropic's dual-class structure different?
Meta's Mark Zuckerberg holds under 15% of the company yet controls over 50% of voting power; SpaceX adopted a supervoting structure for Elon Musk ahead of its June IPO — dual-class shares are standard practice among tech giants.
But Anthropic stacks three unusual factors: founders with extremely low ownership, a trust with power independent of the founders, and a legal designation as a public benefit corporation — meaning leadership can, by law, prioritize societal goals over shareholder returns.
In plain terms = Zuckerberg and Musk only had to solve one problem — voting control. Anthropic must answer three at once: who votes, who guards safety, and who answers to shareholders. This combination is virtually unprecedented in tech-IPO history, and the final structure will be the central variable institutional investors price against.
Content is for reference only, not financial advice.