Anthropic Employees "Hold Back" on Selling Shares, Investors Queue Up Unable to Buy

Original Author: Xiaobing, Shenchao TechFlow

On April 8th, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic's employee equity tender offer was completed last week. The valuation was consistent with the Series G funding round in February of this year, at a pre-money valuation of $350 billion (excluding the $30 billion raised).

The transaction itself was not surprising; the surprising part was the outcome: Investors had prepared $5 to $6 billion to buy shares, but the final transaction amount fell far short of the upper limit. It wasn't a lack of buyers; it was a lack of sellers. Looking at their stock, most Anthropic employees chose not to sell.

What Are the Employees Betting On?

To understand this result, we 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 was approximately $9 billion. By the time of the Series G funding round in February 2026, CFO Krishna Rao announced a figure of $14 billion. Sacra's estimate is more aggressive: by March, annualized revenue had already surpassed $30 billion, exceeding OpenAI's $25 billion. Three years ago, this company had just started generating revenue, and its annualized revenue has maintained over 10x growth for three consecutive years.

The second is the IPO expectation. In March, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic is in talks with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley regarding underwriting, aiming to list on Nasdaq as early as October this year, with a fundraising scale potentially exceeding $60 billion. The valuation range is between $400 billion and $500 billion.

The employees' calculation is simple: selling stock today at a $350 billion valuation, while the company might IPO at a valuation above $400 billion in six months. Selling early means giving up the appreciation potential to the investors buying the shares. Moreover, in California, the combined capital gains tax rate for selling stock this year can exceed 50%. Selling early in the year has the benefit of leaving ten months for tax planning, but many employees clearly feel this benefit is insufficient to offset the potentially higher price achievable by holding until after the IPO.

An Industry-Level Signal

Anthropic's tender offer is not an isolated case. In October 2025, OpenAI just completed a $6.6 billion employee equity tender at a $500 billion valuation. An interesting detail from that transaction: OpenAI originally approved a maximum quota of $10.3 billion, but employees actually sold only two-thirds of that amount. The remaining one-third, OpenAI employees also chose to keep.

SpaceX, Stripe, and Databricks are all doing similar things. For super unicorns choosing to remain private long-term, regular employee equity tenders have become a standard practice, serving both as a retention tool and a valuation anchoring mechanism.

However, the degree of "reluctance to sell" in Anthropic's case stands out even within this group. Revenue is growing rapidly, an IPO is already on the agenda, and the overall valuation of the AI industry is still on an upward trajectory. With these three expectations combined, employees have little reason to cash out urgently.

After Raising $30 Billion, Why Conduct a Tender Offer?

On February 12th, Anthropic just closed a $30 billion Series G funding round, led by GIC and Coatue, with participation from D.E. Shaw, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ, and MGX. This is the second-largest private financing in tech history, second only to OpenAI's $40+ billion last year.

The company is not short of money. So why conduct a tender offer?

Because money raised into the company's account and money in employees' pockets are two different things. The paper value of options and RSUs held by Anthropic's early employees, especially those who left OpenAI in 2021 to follow Dario and Daniela Amodei in starting the company, is already extremely substantial. But before the company goes public, this is all paper wealth. A tender offer is the only legal channel to turn that paper into cash.

This is also part of the AI talent war. It's no longer news that Meta offers nine-figure compensation packages to poach AI researchers. If employees' stock can never be liquidated, even the highest paper value won't retain people. Anthropic needs to provide employees with a regular window to cash out while maintaining team stability. The window opened, most people looked at the scenery outside, and then closed it.

What Does This Mean for the Market?

From an investor's perspective, Anthropic's tender offer not being fully subscribed creates an interesting situation of information asymmetry.

Buyers have plenty of money. The phrasing used in the Bloomberg report was "some investors weren't able to pick up as many shares as they planned." Capital supply is abundant, but the supply of tradable Anthropic equity 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 the IPO pricing in October. If even internal employees are unwilling to sell at a $350 billion price, the public market pricing will only be higher. Of course, this assumes the macro environment doesn't deteriorate significantly. In the current context of the US-Iran war, escalating tariffs, and increased volatility in US stocks, this assumption is not set in stone.

Another noteworthy angle is the revenue recognition method. Anthropic books the full sales amount generated through AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure channels as its own revenue, treating the cloud providers' share as a sales expense. OpenAI uses the net method for Azure sales, booking only its own share. For the same business, the revenue numbers generated by these two accounting methods differ significantly. Bank of America estimates that Anthropic's payments to cloud service providers in 2026 could be as high as $6.4 billion. If the SEC requires a unified accounting standard before the IPO, that $30 billion annualized revenue figure would shrink considerably.

However, these are headaches for the investment banks during the IPO roadshow. For the broader AI investor community, the takeaway from this tender offer is essentially one sentence: For Anthropic's stock at a $350 billion price, some want to buy but can't get enough, and some can sell but are unwilling to. In the AI private market, this seller's market dynamic is becoming increasingly common.