Anthropic’s seven founders have pledged to give away 80% of their personal stakes in the artificial intelligence company, a commitment that could be worth almost $80 billion.
The promise was reaffirmed in the company’s IPO filing, which said each founder had agreed to dedicate 80% of their personal equity to philanthropic causes.
The founders are chief executive Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Chris Olah. Together, they hold about 1.69 billion shares.
Based on those holdings and the price used in Anthropic’s latest private funding round, their combined stakes are estimated to be worth approximately $99.3 billion. Eighty per cent of that figure would amount to about $79.4 billion, or roughly $11 billion per founder on average.
The value of the founders’ remaining holdings cannot yet be established because Anthropic’s filing does not disclose the IPO price or the number of shares each founder intends to sell.
How the Anthropic founders’ pledge would work
The commitments are described as voluntary and revocable rather than legally binding. The filing does not specify when the donations will be made or which organisations will receive them.
The founders could fulfil their pledges through charities, private foundations, donor-advised funds or other philanthropic arrangements.
Giving away most of their equity would not necessarily remove the founders’ influence over Anthropic. Under the company’s planned governance structure, they would collectively retain 50.1% of the voting power on general shareholder matters through a special share held by their Founder LLC.
A founder would remain in the LLC provided they retained at least 2% of the Class A shares they held at the IPO. That means a founder could give away 98% of their stake while still helping determine how the controlling share is voted.
A separate Long-Term Benefit Trust would have the power to appoint a majority of Anthropic’s board.
The personal pledges are separate from Anthropic’s Public Benefit Fund. Based on the same private funding valuation, shares held by the fund would be worth approximately $50 billion.
Anthropic said the fund could support non-profit organisations or distribute money directly to particular groups, including initiatives addressing the effect of AI on workers.
Amodei first outlined the personal pledge in a January essay about the risks posed by AI. He argued that people who become wealthy through the technology have a responsibility to address its economic consequences.
“The thing to worry about is a level of wealth concentration that will break society,” he wrote.
Anthropic reported $16.3 billion in revenue during the first half of 2026, up from $1.2 billion in the same period a year earlier, according to the IPO filing.
The company could raise as much as $100 billion through its listing and plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. Its debut is expected around Thanksgiving and could value Anthropic at between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion.
