American billionaires Dario and Daniela Amodei set for $18 billion each in IPO

American billionaires Dario and Daniela Amodei, the siblings who co-founded artificial intelligence developer Anthropic PBC, would each be worth about $18 billion at the price the company is seeking in its initial public offering.

The figure is based on a Bloomberg calculation of the founders' stakes at the offering price. Anthropic is seeking a valuation of $1.3 trillion to $1.4 trillion in the listing, which would rank among the largest stock market debuts on record. The company plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, with trading expected to begin as soon as Nov. 16.

Each of Anthropic's seven co-founders plans to sell about $250 million of stock in the offering, about $1.75 billion in total. The founders have also committed $50 million to philanthropy in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the company is based.

Stakes and control

The seven co-founders together own about 10% of Anthropic's stock, or roughly 1.4% each. Dario Amodei, 43, is chief executive. Daniela Amodei, 39, is president. The other co-founders are Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Chris Olah.

At Anthropic's last private funding round in May, when it raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, Forbes valued Dario Amodei's stake at $13.6 billion and Daniela Amodei's at $13.7 billion. Both took part in earlier sales of employee shares, including a $4.7 billion sale in April.

The co-founders jointly hold a single non-economic share that carries 50.1% of shareholder votes. A separate body of independent trustees, the Long-Term Benefit Trust, can elect and remove a majority of the company's directors.

Each co-founder has pledged to give 80% of their personal equity to philanthropic causes. The company's prospectus describes those commitments as revocable and not legally binding. Two donor-advised funds already hold Anthropic shares that were worth about $260 million at the May valuation.

From OpenAI to the Nasdaq

The Amodeis left OpenAI in 2021 with several colleagues to start Anthropic, which develops the Claude family of AI models and sells access to businesses and consumers. Dario Amodei had been OpenAI's vice president of research, and Daniela Amodei had served as its vice president of safety and policy.

The San Francisco company filed its registration statement on Oct. 26. In the filing, it said that "frontier AI companies must invest in safety and alignment to help ensure the responsible diffusion of this technology."

The listing would follow a run of large offerings by technology companies this year, including SpaceX, as investors seek exposure to businesses building and selling AI systems.