Anthropic employees "hoarding" old shares, investors lining up to buy but unable to get them

Byline: Xiaobing, Deep Tide TechFlow

On April 8, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic employees’ equity transfer transaction (tender offer) has been completed last week. The valuation matches the company’s G round funding in February this year—an as-pre-money valuation of $350 billion (excluding the $30 billion raised).

The deal itself isn’t surprising; what’s surprising is the outcome. Investors had prepared $5 billion to $6 billion to take it off their hands, but the final transaction amount fell far short of the ceiling. It’s not that there aren’t enough buyers—it’s that there aren’t enough sellers. Anthropic employees looked at the shares they held, and most people chose not to sell.

What are the employees betting on?

To understand this outcome, you need to look at two background figures.

The first is Anthropic’s revenue growth rate. By the end of 2025, the company’s annualized revenue is about $9 billion. By the time of the February 2026 G round, CFO Krishna Rao’s disclosed figure was $14 billion. Sacra’s estimate is even more aggressive: by March, annualized revenue had already exceeded $30 billion, surpassing OpenAI’s $25 billion. Three years ago, this company had just started generating revenue, and annualized revenue had maintained growth of 10x or more for three straight years.

The second is expectations for an IPO. In a March report, Bloomberg said Anthropic is in talks with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley regarding underwriting, with the goal of listing on Nasdaq as early as October this year; the fundraise amount could exceed $60 billion. The valuation range is between $400 billion and $500 billion.

The employees’ arithmetic is simple: sell shares at a $350 billion valuation today, and six months from now the company may IPO with a valuation above $400 billion. Selling early means handing over the upside to the incoming investors. What’s more, in California this year, the combined capital gains tax rate from selling stock can exceed 50%. There’s also an advantage to selling early at the beginning of the year—it leaves ten months for tax planning—but many employees apparently feel that this benefit isn’t enough to offset the higher price they might get by holding through to an IPO.

An industry-level signal

Anthropic’s tender offer isn’t a one-off. In October 2025, OpenAI had just completed an employee equity transfer of $6.6 billion at a $500 billion valuation. One detail of that transaction is particularly interesting: OpenAI had originally approved up to $10.3 billion, but employees actually sold only two-thirds. For the remaining one-third, OpenAI employees also chose to hold on.

SpaceX, Stripe, and Databricks are doing similar things. For super unicorns that choose not to go public for the long term, periodic employee equity transfers have become a standard move—both a tool for retention and a way to anchor valuation.

But the degree of “reluctance to sell” this time at Anthropic is striking even within this group. Revenue is growing rapidly, and an IPO is already on the schedule. With the triple expectations overlapping, employees have no reason to rush to cash out.

After the $30 billion round, why still do a tender?

On February 12, Anthropic just closed its $30 billion G round, led by GIC and Coatue, with D.E. Shaw, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ, and MGX participating. This is the second-largest private placement in the history of technology, second only to OpenAI’s more than $40 billion last year.

The company isn’t short on money. So why do a tender offer?

Because money raised and placed into the company’s accounts is different from the money in employees’ pockets. For early Anthropic employees—especially the group that left OpenAI in 2021 to found the company following Dario and Daniela Amodei—the book value of their options and RSUs is already extremely substantial. But before the company goes public, all of that is paper wealth. A tender offer is the only legal channel to turn paper into cash.

This is also part of the AI talent battle. It’s no longer news that Meta offers nine-figure compensation packages to poach AI researchers. If employees’ stock can never be cashed out, no matter how high the book value is, it can’t retain people. Anthropic needs to provide employees with a periodic cash-out window while maintaining team stability. Once the window opened, most people took a look at the view outside and then shut the door.

What does it mean for the market?

From an investor’s perspective, the fact that Anthropic’s tender offer didn’t fully get filled created an interesting situation of information asymmetry.

Buyers have plenty of money. Bloomberg’s wording was: “some investors weren’t able to pick up as many shares as they planned.” Capital supply is abundant, but the supply of Anthropic equity that’s actually liquid in the secondary market is extremely scarce. On secondary trading platforms like EquityZen and Forge, Anthropic’s implied valuation has already been pushed above $500 billion.

This is a positive signal for IPO pricing in October. If even internal employees aren’t willing to sell at a $350 billion price, public market pricing would only be higher. Of course, the premise is that the macro environment doesn’t deteriorate sharply. In today’s context—an ongoing Iran-U.S. war, upgraded tariffs, and increased volatility in U.S. equities—this premise is far from guaranteed.

Another angle worth watching is how revenue is recognized. Anthropic records the full amount of sales generated through AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure channels as its own revenue, while the cloud service providers’ share is treated as sales expenses. For OpenAI’s Azure sales, it uses the net method, counting only its own share. With the same business, the two accounting approaches produce very different revenue figures. Bank of America estimates that in 2026, Anthropic’s fees paid to cloud service providers could be as high as $6.4 billion. If the SEC requires a unified reporting standard before the IPO, that $30 billion annualized revenue figure would shrink quite a bit.

But these are the kinds of issues investment banks have to worry about during IPO roadshows. For a broader set of AI investors, however, the information in this tender offer boils down to one sentence: With Anthropic’s stock priced at $350 billion, some want to buy but can’t get enough, while others can sell but are unwilling to. In the AI primary market, this kind of seller-favorable situation is becoming increasingly common.