When Anthropic goes public, the stock its seven cofounders hold stands to be worth up to $200 billion between them, carved up into seven nearly identical piles.
Each cofounder, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, holds a stake of between 231 million and 244 million shares. Those stakes would be worth about $21 billion to $30 billion apiece, if Anthropic’s IPO values the company at $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, as some some media reports have indicated the company hopes to do.
The founders’ equity includes exactly 2,185,400 stock options that each person can cash in now and 639,500 restricted stock units that vest after the IPO. Based on Fortune’s analysis, the share ownership gives each cofounder between 1.4% and 1.5% of the company and all told, the debut offering will amp the group’s wealth on paper to about $200 billion. (Full caveat, Anthropic hasn’t priced its shares and the exact details are subject to change. Fortune laid out the math in earlier analyses.)
The approach completely flattens the idea of the pyramid-shaped pay structure you find at most mega-cap public companies with a CEO or founder at the top making the most in cash and equity. At Anthropic, the core septet has no apparent pay pyramid, despite Dario Amodei serving as CEO alongside Daniela Amodei as president and board chairperson. The seven appear to hold nearly identical stakes, and each gets one vote in the entity that will control the company’s shareholder vote, with a separate trust set up to elect the majority of the board.
Robin Ferracone, founder of compensation consulting firm Farient Advisors, said the “egalitarian approach” Anthropic took with its founder group is unusual and noted that seven founders is a “relatively large” group. “It’s unusual to give all the founders the same thing,” said Ferracone. It usually evolves eventually as awards start to vest and pay becomes more linked to positions.
Anthropic described the group “distinctly equipped to be stewards of our mission,” in the registration statement filed Monday, although it singles out Dario and Daniela as “critical to setting our strategic direction,” and says they would be “difficult to replace.”
There also appears to be no sibling rivalry here, at least not yet. The Amodeis as cofounders take equal pay, including annual increases to cash or equity. Last year, both brother and sister took home $654,167 in salary, plus stock and options the filing values at about $13 million combined that would be worth about $330 million at a $2 trillion valuation. They got raises in July, and now both are taking home $1.4 million in salary. In February, Anthropic gave each about 1.4 million stock options and 2.4 million more RSUs, and another 537,000 RSUs in July. The RSUs start paying out once Anthropic goes public in quarterly installments over the next several years, as long as the Amodeis are still at the company. At a $2 trillion valuation, the grants are worth about $505 million each.
“We take internal parity into account when determining executive compensation,” Anthropic’s newly filed registration statement explains. “Each co-founder is paid equal compensation.”
Anthropic’s filing only shows pay for the Amodeis since they are the only two cofounders Anthropic counts as executive officers. The other five in the initial seven—Tom Brown, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Jack Clark, and Chris Olah, hold C-level titles such as chief compute officer and chief science officer, but don’t appear in the company’s pay tables. However, all seven hold identical numbers of options and RSUs that will vest by late November. They align, within a few shares, of the disclosed grants to the Amodeis, which implies the other five got the same awards.
The approach is worlds away from SpaceX, the last company to go public at this scale. In the months before its June 2026 IPO, SpaceX gave Musk a total of 1.3 billion restricted shares in two awards. Both are tied to market-value milestones with one attached to the creation of a human colony on Mars and data centers in space for the other. If he achieves the plan goals including the Mars colony, the awards could be worth $650 billion to $700 billion. No one else at SpaceX comes close.
And unlike Musk’s SpaceX awards, each Anthropic founder has pledged to give 80% of their stock to philanthropy, which could amount to an $80 billion to $165 billion total gift, although the pledges aren’t legally binding. The founders’ awards are structured such that they can maintain control over Anthropic even if they donate away their wealth. Musk, in a post on X last week, pledged to give every child in America a share of his SpaceX stock.
The founders can’t sell stock right away, although all seven are listed as selling stockholders in the IPO. Under the IPO’s lockup terms, the magnificent seven can start selling a portion of their stock about six months after the offering and the rest after about a year. Some have already started to cash in. The Amodeis sold shares in a tender offer in April at $25.91 a share, according to the S-1.
The two board members who will oversee executive comp at Anthropic following the IPO are both investors in the AI frontier lab. Vas Narasimhan, the CEO of Novartis, chairs Anthropic’s compensation committee. Narasimhan bought about $10 million worth of stock in May through a company he owns with his wife a few weeks after joining Anthropic’s board. The comp committee’s other member, Yasmin Razavi, is a general partner at Spark Capital, whose funds have invested $777 million in Anthropic since 2023.
