Anthropic's founders are moving to lock in control of the company before it enters the public markets, seeking a governance structure that would give CEO Dario Amodei and his six co-founders a combined 50.1% of the vote on most corporate matters, according to The Information.
The proposal, which the company is asking shareholders to approve in the coming days, would create special shares for the seven founders that preserve voting power even after Anthropic becomes a publicly traded company. The arrangement would not give the founders any extra economic ownership, but it would ensure they retain decisive influence over the company's direction at a moment when investor scrutiny, market pressure and public accountability are expected to intensify.
The structure is unusual not because it is unprecedented, but because it is collective. Super-voting shares have long been used by founders to maintain control after an initial public offering. Mark Zuckerberg used the mechanism to keep command of Meta, and Evan Spiegel employed a similar structure at Snap. In those cases, however, control was concentrated in a single founder. Anthropic's plan would spread that power across a group of seven co-founders, a design that reflects both the company's origins and the unusual governance questions surrounding frontier artificial intelligence.
The seven founders reportedly each own about 2% of the company, including Amodei. They have also pledged to give away 80% of their wealth, a commitment Amodei announced in January alongside a warning that AI-driven wealth concentration could destabilize society. That pledge adds another layer to the governance debate: the founders are not only seeking to preserve control, but are doing so while publicly framing their work in moral and civilizational terms.
Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust would still choose most of the board under the proposed structure, preserving a separate layer of oversight intended to keep the company aligned with its public-interest mission. The founders' board representation would also expand from two seats to three, while employees would receive their own stock to break ties on certain issues. Together, those provisions suggest Anthropic is trying to balance founder authority, mission protection and employee influence in a way that differs from the standard Silicon Valley playbook.
The timing is significant. Anthropic, just five years old, was valued at $965 billion in May, according to the source material, and was recently valued at $1.5 trillion on the secondary market. Its upcoming IPO is expected to reflect that higher valuation, making it one of the most closely watched public offerings in the technology sector. A company with that scale, and with a central role in the race to build advanced AI systems, is likely to face intense questions from institutional investors about governance, accountability and the concentration of power.
Those questions are especially sharp in Anthropic's case because the company has positioned itself as a safety-focused alternative in the AI race. The founders' push for voting control may reassure some backers who want the company insulated from short-term market pressures. But it may also raise concerns among prospective public shareholders who typically expect greater influence over corporate strategy, board composition and executive oversight once a company lists.
The proposal also highlights a broader fault line in the AI industry: the tension between mission-driven stewardship and the demands of public capital. As frontier AI companies grow larger, more valuable and more central to the global economy, the question of who gets to decide their future is becoming as important as the technology they build.
If approved, Anthropic's structure would place it among the most closely controlled public AI companies in the world, with founders retaining majority voting power even as outside investors buy into the business. For a company whose leaders have warned about the societal risks of concentrated wealth and power, the move is both pragmatic and symbolic: a bid to keep the reins in the hands of the people who built the company, just as it prepares to enter the public spotlight.