Anthropic’s Two-Trillion-Dollar IPO and the Trust That Picks the Board

Anthropic is preparing the largest technology IPO in years. The maker of Claude could be worth up to two trillion dollars when it goes public in the fall of 2026. For investors, the valuation is only half the story. The other half is the question of who actually steers the company after the listing, and at Anthropic the answer looks different from almost any other publicly traded firm.

Key takeaways

• Anthropic confidentially filed a draft prospectus (S-1) with the SEC on June 1, 2026; trading is expected to start in the fall of 2026, led by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley.
• A growing share of the board seats is controlled by the Long-Term Benefit Trust, a body with no equity stake whose up to five trustees answer only to the mission.
• On top of that, the founders around Dario Amodei are set to receive shares with multiple voting rights, according to Bloomberg and The Information, even though together they hold less than five percent of the equity.
• The valuation rose from 380 billion dollars in February 2026 to 965 billion in May and to the two trillion now being floated.
• Buyers of the stock get a claim on the profits but little control over the company’s direction.

A trust that owns no shares yet fills the board

The heart of Anthropic’s governance is the Long-Term Benefit Trust, or LTBT. It holds its own class of stock, the so-called Class T shares, which carry no economic value: no dividend, no capital gain, no financial upside. Their sole purpose is control. The trust can appoint and remove a share of the board that grows over several years, up to a majority. The board currently has six members, including Dario and Daniela Amodei as well as former Netflix chief Reed Hastings and Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan. The trust can be pushed out of its role only with a very large capital majority; the figure cited is 85 percent of the voting rights, and that threshold rises as the trust takes on more power.

The trust currently has three of a possible five trustees: chair Neil Buddy Shah, former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke, and foreign-policy analyst Richard Fontaine. Legal scholar Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, previously also on the body, stepped down in early August 2026. The trustees hold weekly internal meetings, talk regularly with company leadership, and are given advance notice of major moves, including new model launches. How seriously Anthropic takes the safety claim behind this became clear recently with a research model it deliberately trained to be manipulative.

Why the stock market tests this model

Anthropic is organized as a Public Benefit Corporation, a US legal form that explicitly requires the board to pursue a defined public benefit alongside shareholder interests, here the responsible development of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity. On the stock market, that claim meets quarterly reports, activist investors, and class-action lawsuits. The Financial Times puts it bluntly: public-market scrutiny intensifies the pressure on Anthropic’s attempt to balance profit and purpose.

The cautionary tale everyone has in mind is a rival’s failure. When OpenAI’s nonprofit board tried to fire CEO Sam Altman in late 2023, the structure collapsed within days; employees and major investor Microsoft forced his return. Since then it has been an open question whether a mission body can act at all against concentrated commercial pressure. Anthropic answers with a firmer legal anchor, but the real-world test is still to come.

What shareholders get and what they do not

The economic side of the story is impressive. Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate has climbed from around nine billion dollars at the end of 2025 to roughly 65 billion dollars by the summer of 2026. That the IPO is drawing closer, and that Anthropic could even go public ahead of OpenAI, was already apparent in August. About 80 percent of the revenue comes from business and API sales, not from a consumer app. The largest shareholder is Amazon, which holds 15 to 21 percent depending on the count, followed by Google with about 14 percent; neither has a board seat despite billions invested.

Anyone buying the stock is therefore acquiring a stake in a fast-growing business but almost no say. The combination of the trust and the founders’ planned super-voting shares means a very small group sets the strategic direction while public shareholders carry the price risk. That is not new for tech IPOs, as Meta, Alphabet, and Snap have similar dual structures, but no listed company has added the further layer of a mission-bound trust.

Outlook

The Anthropic IPO becomes a live experiment: can a public-benefit control structure be reconciled with capital-market expectations, or does quarterly pressure grind it down over time? For investors, the decisive due diligence this time is not the revenue forecast but the prospectus itself, specifically the passages on Class T shares, on the thresholds for removing the trust, and on the founders’ voting rights. Anyone who reads only the growth numbers there misses what they will not get to decide at Anthropic.