Anthropic is preparing for a major initial public offering expected to begin trading on Nov. 19, a move that could make its seven co-founders multi-billionaires. The company is targeting a market valuation of nearly $1.4 trillion, with share prices potentially reaching between $70 and $78. If these targets are met, the individual stakes held by the founders—each owning approximately 1.4% or 240,000,000 class A shares—could be worth between $17 billion and $18 billion.
The company was founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei after they left their roles as vice presidents at OpenAI. The move was driven by frustrations regarding OpenAI's approach to AI safety and a growing concern that model capabilities might outpace human understanding. The founders were joined by several former OpenAI colleagues, including research engineering lead Tom Brown, policy director Jack Clark, research consultant Jared Kaplan, and technical staff members Sam McCandlish and Chris Olah.
CEO Dario Amodei, a former postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and researcher at Google Brain, co-invented reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) during his tenure at OpenAI. He stated on the Big Technology podcast in July 2025 that his motivation for starting the company was a desire for impact that he felt other companies were not truly oriented toward. "I think my reason to start a company was that I had worked at other companies and I just didn't feel like the way those companies were run was really oriented towards trying to have that impact," Amodei said.
Daniela Amodei serves as the company's president and board chair, bringing experience from a career in politics and risk management at Stripe. Tom Brown, the chief compute officer, previously founded MoPub and Grouper before leading training efforts for OpenAI's GPT-3. Jack Clark serves as the head of public benefit, while Jared Kaplan, the chief science officer, maintains a position as an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Jeffrey Ladish, the executive director of AI safety institute Palisade Research, noted that the group's original motivation was to shape the development of artificial intelligence rather than to achieve wealth. However, Ladish added that the influence of financial incentives is difficult to avoid, noting, "You have investors, and money is not just like an end; it's also a means."
