TL;DR

Anthropic has been preparing a class of stock carrying extra votes for chief executive Dario Amodei and his co-founders, according to The Information, cited by Reuters. It would also keep its non-shareholder trustees in place, with their own share class letting them elect most of the board. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Why the arithmetic requires it

The detail that makes this story more than boilerplate is ownership. Amodei holds roughly 2% of the company, and his co-founders’ stakes are similarly modest by the standards of founder-led technology firms. Without a special class of stock, the people who built Anthropic would have almost no say once public shareholders arrive.

Compare the usual examples. Elon Musk’s voting position at SpaceX rests on a dual-class structure; Mark Zuckerberg controls around 60% of Meta’s votes through supervoting shares. Both founders also hold substantial economic stakes. Amodei would be reaching for the same instrument from a much thinner base — which makes the gap between ownership and control considerably wider than the precedents it invokes.

This would be the first time Anthropic’s leadership held enhanced voting power. Specifics of the arrangement could not be established and the plans may still change.

The trust question

Anthropic is incorporated as a public benefit corporation, obliged to weigh public benefit alongside commercial return, and operates a Long-Term Benefit Trust intended to hold it to its mission. Preserving the trustees’ ability to appoint a board majority is the part worth watching: it entrenches the mission structure at exactly the moment a listing would ordinarily dilute it.

Whether that reassures or unsettles depends on your view of who should be accountable to whom. Insulation from short-term shareholder pressure is the standard defence of dual-class stock, and here it has an unusually coherent rationale — a safety-focused lab arguing it should not be forced to optimise quarterly.

Looking forward

The reported plan comes as Anthropic prepares a flotation expected later this year and widely tipped to be among the largest ever. Recent reporting put its run rate past $65bn and its IPO pricing against a $190bn revenue forecast for 2028. Those numbers set what investors would pay; this one sets what they would actually get for it. For UK institutional investors weighing an allocation, the governance structure is the term that will still bind long after the revenue forecasts have been revised.