Anthropic's $100 Billion IPO Bombshell: The Clause Nobody Saw Coming
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The man who warned the world about AI is about to pull off the biggest stock market debut in history — and buried inside the deal is one clause that changes everything.
Anthropic podría recaudar US$100.000 millones en su salida a bolsa, según The New York Times (21 de agosto de 2026).
Anthropic, the company behind Claude and the world's most valuable AI startup at a $965 billion valuation, is reportedly preparing an IPO that could raise around $100 billion. The twist: CEO Dario Amodei and his co-founders are planning to keep iron-grip control through special shares with extra voting power.
The story broke in stages this week. On August 18, Bloomberg relayed a report from The Information revealing that Anthropic PBC plans to hand Dario Amodei and other co-founders shares with extra voting power ahead of its long-awaited debut on Wall Street. Three days later, on August 21, The New York Times dropped the number that set the internet on fire: the company could aim to raise a staggering $100 billion in what would be a blockbuster IPO.
The Biggest IPO Ever Attempted
To understand the scale: Anthropic raised $65 billion in its Series H funding round earlier this year at a post-money valuation of $965 billion — making it the most valuable AI startup on the planet, surpassing even OpenAI in private-market value. An IPO seeking $100 billion wouldn't just be the largest of 2026; it would rewrite the record books entirely.
Amodei founded the company in 2021 with his sister Daniela and other former OpenAI researchers after leaving over disagreements about how fast AI should be deployed. The bet paid off beyond anyone's imagination.
The Clause Nobody Saw Coming
Here's where it gets interesting. Most tech founders lose some control when they go public — shareholders get votes, boards get louder, quarterly pressure takes over. But according to the report, Anthropic is structuring the offering so that Amodei and his inner circle hold shares carrying outsized voting rights, similar to the dual-class structures used by Meta and Google.
The irony hasn't been lost on critics. This is the same CEO who spent 2026 clashing publicly with Washington — the Trump administration ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic technology in February, then briefly forced the company to cut off foreign access to its most powerful models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, before reversing course for more than 100 U.S. organizations. Amodei has also posted unusually candid defenses of his regulatory stance on X in recent days, calling for what one adviser described as "a DMV for AI."
What It Means for You
If you've been watching the AI gold rush from the sidelines, this IPO could be your first chance to buy a piece of the frontier-AI race through a regular brokerage account. Analysts warn, though, that the extra-voting-power structure means public investors get economic upside without real say in how the company is run — a trade-off that burned retail investors before. No official filing date has been announced yet, but insiders expect paperwork within months.
