❯ Anthropic Prepares Super-Voting Shares for Founders, Paving the Way for a Possible September IPO

CONTROLAccording to The Information, Anthropic is preparing a class of shares with enhanced voting rights for CEO Dario Amodei and other co-founders, designed to insulate them from outside shareholder pressure after going public. The urgency is practical: the equity is already diluted paper-thin. Amodei himself holds only about 2%, and the seven co-founders — who once split their stakes roughly evenly — now own less than 5% combined. The company could launch its IPO in September.

DUAL-CLASSThis is a well-worn Silicon Valley playbook. Zuckerberg holds roughly 60% of Meta’s voting power through dual-class stock; Musk holds more than 80% of the vote at SpaceX. Anthropic also plans to retain its existing non-shareholder trustee body, granting it a special class of stock to elect a majority of the board seats. Public investors who buy into this IPO would get neither voting power nor board control. The specific multiple has not been disclosed, and the plan could still change.

FINANCIALSThe confidence is in the books. According to The Wall Street Journal, Anthropic’s second-quarter revenue grew more than 100% year over year to $11.6 billion, and the company turned a modest operating profit — while OpenAI’s losses widened to $12.3 billion over the same period. When a frontier lab that already turns a profit rings the bell, the bargaining power naturally rests with the founders.

PRICINGGovernance terms will fold directly into pricing. How much of a discount institutional investors, accustomed to one-share-one-vote, will demand for having no say is the core question for underwriters next. For Anthropic itself, super-voting shares are the last chance to lock “safety first” into the corporate charter; after listing, adding them would hinge on shareholder goodwill. For institutional investors preparing to place orders, the next item to recalculate is the governance discount: at the same valuation, how much cheaper should shares without voting rights be?

▪ SIGNALA company that wrote safety into its mission is going public — the hardest thing to negotiate was never valuation; it’s who gets to press the stop button when things are at their worst.