Anthropic is moving toward a massive IPO that could value the company at $1.4 trillion, and its new S-1 filing reveals how many shares each of its seven co-founders intends to sell. Each founder plans to sell 3,378,378 shares. Anthropic has set an unusually wide initial price range of $70 to $78 per share. At the midpoint of $74, each founder would bring in just under $250 million. At the low end of $70, each would pocket a little more than $236 million in cash; at the high end of $78, each would take in just under $264 million. In an IPO as hotly anticipated as this one, however, companies often end up pricing shares above the initial range. The S-1 already signals strong demand. Board member Reed Hastings has indicated he wants to buy $300 million worth of shares through his donor-advised fund, and board member Christopher Liddell also wants to purchase $3 million worth of shares.

The seven co-founders are CEO Dario Amodei; Daniela Amodei, president and chair of the board; Tom Brown, chief compute officer; Jack Clark, head of public benefit; Jared Kaplan, chief science officer (pictured above); Sam McCandlish, chief architect; and Christopher Olah, interpretability research lead. After the sale, each will own about 3.2% of the total outstanding Class A shares, according to the S-1, or roughly 22% collectively. That figure does not represent their stake in the company overall. Class A is only one of Anthropic's share classes, and other holders, including Amazon and Google, hold non-voting Class N shares, so the founders' share of the company's total equity will be considerably smaller. Even so, as a group they remain in control of the company. Each will also receive one share of Class F stock, which carries supervoting rights. Collectively, the founders will control 51.1% of the votes, but no single founder will hold significantly more shares or votes than the others.

As is now industry lore, the seven left OpenAI to start Anthropic in 2021 after disagreements with OpenAI's leadership over how AI should be built. Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who held senior research and policy roles at OpenAI, were joined by five fellow OpenAI colleagues in forming a company that has said, very publicly and from the start, that it is more focused on AI safety than its rivals, including the founders' former employer.