Anthropic S-1: $216bn of staff equity, $160bn still to grant

Anthropic is selling 825 million shares at $70 to $78 under the ticker ANT, which is $64.4bn at the top of the range. Pricing is set for Wednesday night, with trading from Thursday 19 November.

Add a $26bn private placement from Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC, plus the greenshoe, and the total raise passes $100bn.

The employee equity is bigger than the deal. According to the filing as reported by ZeroHedge and summarised by SaaStr, staff hold 1.77 billion options at an average strike of $2.91 and 1.07 billion unvested RSUs.

At $78 that is roughly $138bn of gross option value, about $133bn after the strike, and $84bn of RSUs. Current option and RSU holders therefore sit on about $216bn net. At $70 it is about $194bn.

Anthropic had approximately 5,300 employees as of 30 September 2026. Divide one number by the other and the average is about $41 million a head.

The average is close to meaningless. Headcount went from about 940 at the end of 2024 to 5,300, so more than 80% of current staff joined in the past 21 months, and former employees still hold vested options.

A $2.91 strike against $78 is a 27x spread, which means the deep money belongs to the roughly 1,000 people who joined before 2025. Later hires mostly hold RSUs, around $20 million each on average across 4,000-plus people.

The co-founders are separate. Each of the seven is selling 3.38 million shares, about $264 million apiece and $1.85bn in total. Secondary is 23.6 million shares, or 3% of the deal; the other 97% is primary capital for the company.

The line that matters for everyone else is the reserve. The 2026 equity plan and ESPP hold 2.05 billion shares for future grants, worth about $160bn at $78 — roughly 74% of what all current holders own put together.

That pool is pointed at candidates. The filing says competition for staff "is exceptionally intense and has escalated significantly in recent periods, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area".

The company also reports about $32.3bn of unrecognised stock-based compensation expense on RSUs, against $84bn of market value for the same unvested shares, and says RSU expense will rise in the quarter the offering closes.

Anthropic's revenue run rate was $81bn as of 31 October, up $10bn in a month, with trailing twelve-month revenue per employee above $6.6 million, against $1.4 million a year earlier.

For a founder hiring engineer number three, the arithmetic has changed. A four-year option grant with no liquidity is now being compared with RSUs that settle into a listed stock, and the counter-offers are scope, ownership and speed of decision, because the cash and paper will not win.

The other side of it: the filing says former employees are generally able to join competitors immediately, and thousands of them can soon afford to do whatever they like. Lockup terms were not in the coverage of the filing, so when that supply arrives is still an open question.

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