The Financial Times reported on November 13th, 2026 that Sam Bankman-Fried will miss a windfall of close to $40 billion when Anthropic goes public. In a story by San Francisco venture capital correspondent George Hammond, the paper put the $500 million his firm invested at about $37 billion at next week's expected IPO price.
The stake is long gone. Alameda Research Ventures, the venture arm of Bankman-Fried's trading firm, bought nearly 14% of Anthropic in 2021, when the lab was valued at about $4 billion. The FTX bankruptcy estate sold that holding in 2024 for about $1.3 billion.
What happened
CNBC reported in March 2024 that the estate agreed, in a filing to the Delaware bankruptcy court overseen by Judge John Dorsey, to sell the majority of its Anthropic position for $884 million. The largest buyer was a group aligned with the UAE sovereign fund Mubadala, and the second biggest was Jane Street. Cryptopolitan puts the full disposal at roughly $1.34 billion.
One detail worth correcting at the outset: this block was not forfeited to the government. It was sold in bankruptcy, with proceeds going back to creditors. A genuinely forfeited block does exist, and it is much smaller.
Why the figure is disputed
Anthropic said in an amended S-1 filed on November 10th, 2026 that it will offer 825 million Class A shares at $70 to $78 each, raising up to about $64.4 billion, and list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT, according to CNBC and Decrypt. The Decoder reported that a concurrent private placement of $26 billion would take the combined total to the largest IPO ever.
The headline sum moves with whichever valuation an outlet picks. Benzinga and Cryptopolitan report about $37 billion at a $1.5 trillion valuation. Trendingtopics.eu calculates $40.8 billion at $1.5 trillion, $47.6 billion at $1.75 trillion and $54.4 billion at $2 trillion, working from 44.5 million Series B shares at a prospectus price of $11.2261. SBF Index puts the block at 445.4 million shares, or 2.5% of the company, worth $40.08 billion at the pre-IPO price. Startup Fortune notes that the actual $70 to $78 offering range implies closer to $31 billion to $35 billion.
The underlying valuation reporting is inconsistent too. Decrypt and Seeking Alpha put the range at up to about $1.4 trillion fully diluted. Aistockwire calculates about $916 billion to $1.02 trillion on roughly 13.09 billion shares outstanding. The $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion figures behind the largest headline numbers are an analyst and Polymarket assumption, not the filed range. Readers should treat the premise as directionally large rather than precisely $40 billion. Details on the stake at /companies/ANT will firm up once the shares trade.
What the record shows
Our own insider database has nothing on Anthropic. The company has not traded, so there are no Form 4 filings, no purchase or sale history and no officer or director record to check against the IPO. That will change only after listing.
What the public record does show is the separate forfeited block. BeInCrypto, citing Anthropic's S-1, reported that the US government sold 4,453,900 Anthropic Series B shares forfeited by Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh for $627 million, with proceeds going to the FTX estate, after the pair had invested $50 million in 2022. BeInCrypto further reported that Anthropic bought those shares back from the government in October 2025 at $140.9676 each and resold them at cost to nine undisclosed buyers, a block it values at about $3.94 billion at a $1.5 trillion valuation.
What to watch
Bloomberg News reported on November 12th, 2026, as carried by Reuters via MarketScreener and by Seeking Alpha, that the Anthropic book had drawn about six times the orders for the shares available, and that bankers told prospective investors existing backers would be prioritised, leaving some buyers with smaller allocations than they asked for. Le Private Banker and opentools.ai add that the book reached that level after three days of investor meetings in New York, Boston and San Francisco, a timing detail the wire text we could read does not carry.
CNBC reported that Anthropic is looking to start trading on November 19th, 2026, and Yahoo Finance reported that it expects to price on November 18th, 2026. For scale on how far the lab has travelled since the estate sold, CNBC reported Anthropic's valuation hit $18 billion in December 2023, which put FTX's then roughly 8% stake at about $1.4 billion when the sale was agreed. The Decoder reported that chief executive Dario Amodei, days before the listing, called buying compute the deepest business dilemma his company faces, with commitments totalling nearly $901 billion.
Reporting from the Financial Times, CNBC, Reuters via MarketScreener, Seeking Alpha, Benzinga, BeInCrypto, Decrypt, Cryptopolitan, The Decoder, Startup Fortune, trendingtopics.eu, SBF Index and Le Private Banker, dated November 10th to November 14th, 2026.
Informational only, not investment advice.