Anthropic founders want 50.1 per cent of the vote before float

Founders want the votes, not the money

Anthropic's seven co-founders, including CEO Dario Amodei and president Daniela Amodei, are asking shareholders to approve a new super-voting share class that would concentrate 50.1 per cent of voting power in their hands on most ordinary corporate decisions. Each founder holds roughly 2 per cent in economic terms, and the proposed class carries no additional financial rights. Control and capital are being split cleanly: the founders would govern without owning.

How the governance layers stack up

The super-voting proposal sits alongside existing structural protections Anthropic embedded in 2023. When Anthropic closed its Series C round on 19 September 2023, it amended its corporate charter to create Class T stock held exclusively by the Long-Term Benefit Trust, granting that trust authority to elect and remove board members and phase in a majority vote within four years.^[2] The Trust is a Delaware purpose trust with five financially disinterested members whose brief is to ensure Anthropic balances stockholder returns against its public benefit mission.^[2]

Layered on top of all this is the founders' pledge to donate 80 per cent of their personal gains. A company adding governance mechanisms one on another before a public listing is preparing for the activist pressure that arrives with it.

Valuation trajectory

Anthropic raised $30 billion in Series G funding at a post-money valuation of $380 billion, announced on 12 February 2026.^[3] Secondary market pricing has since implied valuations as high as $2 trillion, a more than five-fold jump in under a year. Coatue founder and portfolio manager Philippe Laffont said that since his firm's initial investment in 2025, Anthropic's focus on agentic coding and enterprise-grade AI systems has accelerated its progress toward large-scale adoption.^[3]

The Akamai deal and what it signals

On 24 September 2026, Akamai Technologies announced an $11.6 billion multi-year agreement to support Anthropic's CPU workload growth at scale.^[1] The deal includes an option to expand by a further $9 billion, putting the total potential commitment at roughly $20 billion.^[1] As part of the arrangement, Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant for non-voting convertible Series B Preferred Stock representing up to approximately 5 per cent of Akamai's common stock outstanding, with roughly 2 per cent vesting immediately and the remaining 3 per cent vesting as the relationship expands.^[1]

Akamai co-founder and CEO Dr Tom Leighton said Anthropic is advancing the AI revolution and his company is thrilled they chose Akamai's capabilities for building and operating AI infrastructure at scale.^[1] A seven-year infrastructure commitment of this size functions as a forward revenue signal, the kind of contracted spend that sits near the front of an IPO prospectus. Anthropic's Series G closed on 12 February 2026 at a $380 billion valuation; the Akamai deal landed roughly six weeks after secondary-market pricing reached $2 trillion.