In the first mega-IPO of 2026, SpaceX (SPCX) named one person in its prospectus as the ringleader: none other than the world’s richest person, Elon Musk.
The next big IPO of the year – Anthropic (ANTH.PVT), which could be the biggest ever – is driven more by a committee of founders. That’s a good thing given its mission and structures, according to veteran negotiator Jim Neeson.
“I would say that having seven founders working together can make it not just a cult of Elon Musk, right?” » said the group’s founding leader Connor on Sozzi Unleashed. “There’s actually a consortium of people making decisions, which I think can be a good thing.”
Neeson noted that Anthropic is a public benefit corporation made up of seven founders who collectively own 50.1%.
“You have a board of directors that will be approved by some sort of trust fund. And then you also have a business where it’s not just going to be about profits. It’s also going to be sort of an employee benefits element built into their doctrine,” he explained.
Anthropic’s founders are CEO Dario Amodei and his sister and president, Daniela Amodei, as well as Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Chris Olah. The consortium left OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) to launch Anthropic in January 2021.
The seven co-founders will receive new shares of Class F common stock in the IPO, giving them majority control of the company — something Neeson said investors will have to manage.
“If you look at Meta (and) also Google, you have very strong founders,” Neeson said. “This is often the case in venture capital. I want founders who can make strong decisions and not be beholden to quarterly type trends.”
“It will be a different type of structure and it will be tested,” he added. “We’ve never seen this, especially at this scale, and especially at these growth rates. So I would say it’s something that analysts and investors are going to be watching very closely.”
The group appears to manage its finances relatively well.
Anthropic’s revenue in the first half of 2026 jumped to $16.3 billion from $1.1 billion a year earlier, according to the prospectus. The filing also reveals a first-half net loss of $80.7 billion, a strong signal of aggressive spending on AI in the years to come.
On an adjusted basis, Anthropic reported an operating profit of $1.62 billion in the first six months of 2026, compared to a loss of $1.85 billion last year.
Investment bankers are reportedly targeting an astronomical valuation of around $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion.
Anthropic could hit the public markets before the end of November. It plans to list on Nasdaq under the symbol ANT.
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