Each of Anthropic's 7 co-founders plans to sell 3,378,378 shares in the company's stock market listing, which would bring each of them just under $ 250 million (about R4.1 billion) at the middle of the price range. The figures come from an updated filing on Tuesday, 10 November, in which Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI models, set a price range of $70 to $78 (about R1,152 to R1,284) a share.

Pricing is expected on 18 November, with trading on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT from 19 November.

The co-founders are chief executive Dario Amodei, president and board chair Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Christopher Olah, who left OpenAI together to start Anthropic in 2021. Each is selling the same number of shares, and together their sales make up all of the roughly 23.6 million shares being sold by existing shareholders, about $ 1.75 billion (about R28.8 billion) combined at the midpoint.

That is a small part of a much larger deal. Anthropic itself is selling about 801 million new shares, and the offering could raise up to $64.4 billion (about R1.06 trillion) at the top of the range. Seven strategic partners, including Google and Nvidia, have also agreed to buy $26 billion (about R428 billion) of non-voting shares at the IPO price.

After the sale, the founders will still control 51.1% of shareholder votes through special supervoting shares, though no single founder will have significantly more votes than the others. The price range values Anthropic at up to $1.4 trillion (about R23 trillion) on a fully diluted basis, or about $1 trillion (about R16.5 trillion) based on the shares outstanding after the offering. That is well below the roughly $2 trillion (about R33 trillion) that some investors and analysts floated over the summer, after a sell-off in AI shares, but above the $965 billion (about R15.9 trillion) valuation of its last private funding round in May.

Anthropic reported revenue of $33.2 billion (about R546 billion) for the first 9 months of 2026, up from $ 2.5 billion (about R41 billion) a year earlier, though it has said it may not achieve or sustain profitability. It is reserving about 20% of the shares for individual investors, against a typical 5% to 10%.

TechCrunch's Julie Bort worked out the founders' payouts and noted board member Reed Hastings wants to buy $300 million (about R4.9 billion) of shares through his charitable fund. Fortune described the valuation as nearly unprecedented and also a disappointment compared with summer expectations, asking whether it is a smart strategy or a warning sign. Yahoo Finance reported that some major investors had told The Wall Street Journal the valuation would likely need to come down after the AI sell-off, and that the order book is reportedly already covered at the proposed range.

R4 billion each is an enormous sum, but in context the founders are selling a small slice and keeping control, which is normal in large tech listings. The more telling number is the valuation. Hopes of a $2 trillion (about R33 trillion) listing have come down by about 30% in a few months, as investors grew more careful after China's AI shares crashed and Alphabet's shares fell over its AI spending.

Pricing the range lower can also be a deliberate choice, leaving room for the shares to rise once they trade, and the deal would still be one of the largest listings ever. What has not changed is the governance question we raised when Anthropic filed to list: public investors will put in tens of billions of dollars while the founders keep control of the votes.

This is not investment advice, but anyone considering buying should judge the price against the company's losses and that structure, not just the growth.

You might also like our piece on Anthropic's public benefit fund, Anthropic's FlashProve research, and Claude vs ChatGPT in SA.

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