Written by: Xiaobing, Deep Tide TechFlow
On April 8, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic's employee stock transfer transaction (tender offer) was completed last week. The valuation is on par with the Series G financing in February this year, with a pre-money valuation of $350 billion (excluding the $30 billion raised).
The transaction itself is not surprising; what is surprising is the result: investors prepared $5 to $6 billion to take over the shares, but the final transaction amount fell far short of the upper limit. It’s not that there weren’t enough buyers; it’s that there weren’t enough sellers. Looking at the shares in their hands, most Anthropic employees chose not to sell.
What Are Employees Betting On?
To understand this result, two background numbers need to be considered.
The first is Anthropic’s revenue growth rate. By the end of 2025, the company’s annualized revenue was approximately $9 billion. By February 2026, during the Series G financing, CFO Krishna Rao announced a figure of $14 billion. Sacra’s estimate is more aggressive: by March, annualized revenue had already exceeded $30 billion, surpassing OpenAI’s $25 billion. Three years ago, the company had just started generating revenue, and its annualized revenue has maintained a growth rate of over 10x 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 for 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 shares at a $350 billion valuation today, while the company may IPO at a valuation of over $400 billion in six months. Selling too early means giving up the appreciation potential to the investors taking over. Moreover, in California, the capital gains tax rate for selling shares this year can exceed 50%. Selling early in the year has the advantage of leaving ten months for tax planning, but many employees clearly feel that this benefit is not enough to offset the potential for a higher price if held 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 stock transfer at a valuation of $500 billion. One detail of that transaction was interesting: OpenAI originally approved a maximum quota of $10.3 billion, but employees actually sold only two-thirds of it. The remaining one-third, OpenAI employees also chose to hold onto.
SpaceX, Stripe, and Databricks are all doing similar things. For super unicorns that choose to remain unlisted for the long term, regular employee stock transfers have become a standard practice, serving both as a retention tool and a valuation anchoring mechanism.
However, the degree of "holding back" in Anthropic’s case stands out even within this group. Revenue is growing rapidly, the 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 no reason to cash out urgently.
After Raising $30 Billion, Why Still Do a Tender?
On February 12, Anthropic just closed a $30 billion Series G financing, 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 over $40 billion last year.
The company is not short of money. So why still do a tender offer?
Because the money raised that goes into the company’s accounts and the money in employees’ pockets are two different things. The early employees of Anthropic, especially those who left OpenAI in 2021 to follow Dario and Daniela Amodei in starting the business, have options and RSUs with extremely substantial paper value. But before the company goes public, these are all paper riches. A tender offer is the only legal channel to turn 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’ shares can never be cashed out, no matter how high the paper value, it won’t retain talent. Anthropic needs to provide employees with a regular window to cash out while maintaining team stability. The window opened, but most people looked at the scenery outside and closed it again.
What Does This Mean for the Market?
From an investor’s perspective, Anthropic’s tender offer not being fully completed creates an interesting situation of information asymmetry.
Buyers have plenty of money. Bloomberg’s report used the phrase "some investors weren't able to pick up as many shares as they planned." Capital supply is abundant, but the supply of tradable Anthropic shares in the secondary market is extremely scarce. On secondary trading platforms like EquityZen and Forge, Anthropic’s implied valuation has 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 valuation, the public market pricing will only be higher. Of course, this assumes the macro environment does not deteriorate significantly. With the U.S.-Iran war, tariff escalations, and increased volatility in U.S. stocks, this assumption is not set in stone.
Another angle worth noting 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 sales expenses. OpenAI uses the net method for Azure sales, booking only its own share. For the same business, the two accounting methods produce vastly different revenue numbers. Bank of America estimates that Anthropic’s payments to cloud providers in 2026 could be as high as $6.4 billion. If the SEC requires uniformity in accounting methods before the IPO, that $30 billion annualized revenue figure would shrink significantly.
However, these are headaches for the investment banks during the IPO roadshow. For broader AI investors, the takeaway from this tender offer is essentially one sentence: For Anthropic’s shares, at a $350 billion valuation, some want to buy but can’t get enough, and some can sell but are unwilling to. In the AI primary market, this seller’s market is becoming increasingly common.
