Anthropic's founders once pledged to donate most of their shares; the IPO filing says otherwise
Anthropic's founders pledged to donate most of their stock. Their IPO tells another story.
In the S-1 registration statement Anthropic filed with the SEC for its listing, the company describes the charitable pledge its founders made when founding the company to donate 80% of their personal shares as a "voluntary, revocable statement" that does not constitute a binding obligation, and the timing, amount and recipients of the donations are all uncertain. The offering is scheduled for around mid-November and is expected to become one of the largest stock listings in history, with investors estimating a valuation of about 1.5 to 2 trillion US dollars. The filing discloses that in the first half of 2026 the company had a net loss of more than 80 billion US dollars and revenue of 16.3 billion US dollars, liabilities of 6.2 billion US dollars owed mainly to Amazon, and additionally owed more than 475 billion US dollars to compute suppliers, including about 115 billion to Google by 2033, 110 billion to Amazon over the next 10 years, and up to 120.5 billion US dollars to SpaceX by 2029 for obtaining Nvidia GPUs.
The IPO filing describes the founder's pledge to donate 80% of shares as voluntary and revocable and not a binding obligation, which offers a way to observe how public commitments weaken in the face of the financial realities of going public.