Anthropic Filing Shows U.S. Sold Forfeited Shares for $627 Million Before IPO

Anthropic's IPO paperwork contains a footnote with a big number attached. The U.S. government sold a block of forfeited Anthropic shares for about $627 million in October 2025. At the valuations now being floated, that block is worth several times more.

The company filed its Form S-1 with the SEC on Monday, Oct. 26. It plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker "ANT." The prospectus carries no IPO valuation.

What the filing says about the shares

Anthropic repurchased 4,453,900 Series B shares from the U.S. government in October 2025 at $140.9676 per share, roughly $627 million in total. That price matched the per-share price in its Series F financing the previous month. Anthropic then resold the shares to nine investors at the same price, so the company made no profit on the round trip.

The filing says the shares "had been forfeited by former holders in legal proceedings to which we were not a party." It does not name those holders. It does not name the nine buyers either.

Business Insider reported that the share count lines up exactly with what Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh paid in 2022. Court records show Singh put in $40 million and Ellison $10 million at $11.2261 per share. That is $50 million, or 4,453,900 shares.

Both Ellison and Singh pleaded guilty and testified against Sam Bankman-Fried. A jury convicted him in 2023, and he is serving a 25-year sentence over the collapse of FTX. Prosecutors said he used Alameda Research to siphon billions of dollars from FTX customers.

The government held the shares by April 2025 at the latest, and the U.S. Marshals Service reportedly ran the sale.

What the block could be worth

The 4.45 million shares represent about 0.25% of Anthropic's current share count. At a $1.5 trillion valuation, the figure seen on the secondary market, that is about $3.94 billion. That is roughly six times the sale price.

That $1.5 trillion is not an offering valuation. Anthropic's last priced round, this spring, valued the company at $965 billion. Investors have signaled a fair value of $1.8 trillion to $2 trillion, according to Bloomberg. PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes estimated the block would be worth about $5.44 billion at a $2 trillion IPO.

The arithmetic is straightforward. The nine buyers hold shares bought at $627 million in total, and the paper value is several billion dollars.

Where the money went

The FTX bankruptcy estate, not the Treasury, appears to have ended up with the cash. Court filings show the Justice Department sent the estate $638 million in late 2025. A Justice Department spokesperson said: "One of the Justice Department's top priorities is returning forfeited funds to victims through the asset forfeiture program whenever the law allows."

The estate pays creditors in rounds. The most recent was a $900 million fifth distribution in July.

The government's sale was priced off a funding round that had closed weeks earlier. Nobody could have known in October 2025 where the valuation would be a year later. Defenders of the outcome can also point to the direct result: money went back to the people FTX's collapse hurt, not into the general fund.

Bankman-Fried's own stake took a separate route. His $500 million Series B purchase, which court records put at 13.56% of Anthropic at the time, became part of the bankruptcy estate. The estate sold it in 2024 for $1.3 billion to dozens of buyers.

The rest of the S-1

Anthropic reported $16.3 billion in revenue for the first half of 2026, up from $1.16 billion a year earlier. It also reported a net loss of almost $81 billion for the period.

No single customer accounted for more than 10% of revenue in the nine months ended Sept. 30, 2026. The top five made up about 25%.

The company warned that its historical growth rates "are not indicative of future performance." It listed its dependence on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. as a key risk, along with tensions with China and power-grid disruptions. It also warned its models might "behave in unintended, misaligned, and autonomous ways," including taking "harmful actions that no user or third-party directed."

Who else stands to gain

Bloomberg reported that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt holds about a 1% stake. He first invested in 2021, when PitchBook data put Anthropic's valuation at $461 million. At $2 trillion, Bloomberg estimates his net worth would rise from $57.5 billion to nearly $80 billion. Schmidt and Anthropic declined to comment.

People familiar with the plans told Bloomberg that Anthropic could begin formally marketing the IPO as soon as the week of Nov. 9, with trading likely before Thanksgiving. They said the company is aiming to match or beat SpaceX's $1.77 trillion IPO from June.

Several questions remain open. Neither Anthropic nor the Justice Department has said who the nine buyers are, and the offering price will not be known until the roadshow is done. When it is set, it will show how much value the 2025 sale left on the table.

The gap between the $627 million the government received and what those shares are worth on the open market will be visible as soon as ANT starts trading.