Anthropic Employees “Hoard” Pre-IPO Shares, Leaving Investors Queuing in Vain
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Anthropic Employees “Hoard” Pre-IPO Shares, Leaving Investors Queuing in Vain
Anthropic’s shares—priced at $35 billion—see some buyers unable to purchase enough, while others who can sell choose not to.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Xiao Bing, TechFlow
On April 8, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic’s employee stock tender offer was completed last week. Its valuation remained unchanged from its February Series G funding round—i.e., a pre-money valuation of $350 billion (excluding the $30 billion raised).
The tender offer itself was unsurprising; what was surprising was the outcome: Investors had allocated $5–6 billion to purchase shares, but the final transaction amount fell far short of that ceiling. It wasn’t a shortage of buyers—it was a shortage of sellers. Anthropic employees looked at their stock holdings and, for the most part, chose not to sell.
What Are Employees Betting On?
To understand this result, consider two key figures.
The first is Anthropic’s revenue growth rate. By the end of 2025, its annualized revenue stood at approximately $9 billion. By February 2026—when it closed its Series G round—CFO Krishna Rao announced annualized revenue had reached $14 billion. Sacra’s estimate is even more aggressive: by March, annualized revenue had already surpassed $30 billion—exceeding OpenAI’s $25 billion. Just three years ago, the company had only just begun generating revenue—and has since sustained over 10x year-on-year growth for three consecutive years.
The second factor is IPO expectations. In March, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic was in discussions with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley regarding underwriting its IPO, targeting a Nasdaq listing as early as October this year, with a potential fundraising size exceeding $60 billion. The projected valuation range stands between $400 billion and $500 billion.
The employees’ arithmetic is straightforward: selling today at a $350 billion valuation means forfeiting upside to investors who will benefit from a likely post-IPO valuation above $400 billion just six months later. Moreover, in California, capital gains tax on stock sales this year could total over 50%. Selling early does provide ten months for tax planning—but many employees evidently believe that benefit doesn’t outweigh the potential for significantly higher returns by holding through IPO.
A Sector-Wide Signal
Anthropic’s tender offer is no outlier. In October 2025, OpenAI completed a $6.6 billion employee stock tender offer at a $500 billion valuation. A notable detail from that deal: OpenAI had originally approved up to $10.3 billion in purchase capacity, yet employees sold only about two-thirds of that amount—the remaining third they chose to retain.
SpaceX, Stripe, and Databricks are doing similar things. For “super-unicorns” opting to remain private for extended periods, periodic employee stock tender offers have become standard practice—not only as a retention tool, but also as a mechanism to anchor valuation.
Yet even within this cohort, Anthropic’s degree of “reluctant selling” stands out. Revenue is surging, an IPO is firmly on the calendar, and AI sector valuations overall remain in an upward trajectory. With these three bullish catalysts converging, employees have little reason to rush into liquidity.
Why Run a Tender Offer After Raising $30 Billion?
On February 12, Anthropic closed its $30 billion Series G round, co-led by GIC and Coatue, with participation from D.E. Shaw, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ, and MGX. This ranks as the second-largest private fundraising in tech history—just behind OpenAI’s $40+ billion round last year.
The company clearly isn’t cash-constrained. So why run a tender offer?
Because money raised and deposited into the company’s bank account is fundamentally different from money in employees’ pockets. Early Anthropic employees—especially those who left OpenAI in 2021 to join Dario and Daniela Amodei in founding the company—now hold options and RSUs with extremely high paper valuations. But until the company goes public, those remain illiquid. A tender offer is the sole legal channel to convert paper wealth into real cash.
This is also part of the broader AI talent war. Meta’s nine-figure compensation packages for AI researchers are no longer news. If employees’ stock can never be monetized, even astronomical paper valuations won’t retain top talent. Anthropic needs to offer regular liquidity windows to sustain team stability. The window opened—but most employees peeked outside, then closed it again.
What Does This Mean for the Market?
From an investor perspective, Anthropic’s undersubscribed tender offer creates an intriguing information asymmetry.
Buyers have ample capital. Bloomberg phrased it as “some investors weren’t able to pick up as many shares as they planned.” Capital supply is abundant—but the supply of tradable Anthropic equity in the secondary market is extremely scarce. On secondary platforms like EquityZen and Forge, Anthropic’s implied valuation has already been pushed above $500 billion.
This bodes well for its October IPO pricing. If even internal employees refuse to sell at $350 billion, public-market pricing will almost certainly be higher—assuming macro conditions don’t deteriorate sharply. Given ongoing U.S.-Iran tensions, escalating tariffs, and heightened U.S. equity market volatility, however, that assumption isn’t guaranteed.
Another angle worth watching is revenue recognition methodology. Anthropic books the full value of sales generated via AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure as its own revenue, treating cloud providers’ commissions as sales expenses. OpenAI, by contrast, uses the net method for Azure sales—recording only its share. Identical business activities thus yield vastly different revenue figures under the two accounting approaches. Bank of America estimates Anthropic’s 2026 payments to cloud providers could reach $6.4 billion. Were the SEC to require standardized reporting ahead of IPO, that $30 billion annualized revenue figure would shrink considerably.
Still, such matters fall squarely on investment banks’ shoulders during roadshows. For broader AI investors, the takeaway from this tender offer is distilled into one sentence: At $35 billion, demand for Anthropic stock exceeds supply—buyers want more than they can get, and sellers who could transact choose not to. In AI’s private markets, this seller-favored dynamic is becoming increasingly common.
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