Anthropic seeks IPO while keeping control with founders

Anthropic is preparing to go public but does not intend to give up control. According to The Information, the company asked shareholders to approve a structure in which chief executive Dario Amodei and six co-founders receive special shares with a combined right to 50.1 percent of the vote on most corporate matters. This is conditional on at least three of them retaining a minimum stake. The arrangement is not new, but at a company of this scale it carries different weight than in an ordinary startup. The goal is to ensure that after the debut, no outside party can outvote the lab's direction.

The second thread of this puzzle is infrastructure funding. Akamai announced that Anthropic will spend $11.6 billion over seven years on its cloud infrastructure. That is more than six times the $1.8 billion deal Bloomberg reported in May. The commitment is not unconditional; it depends on Akamai meeting delivery and service availability requirements.

For Akamai, the deal translates into $5.5 billion in additional capital expenditure. The two companies can extend the contract by up to $9 billion. Under the agreement, Akamai also issued Anthropic warrants to buy up to 5 percent of its common stock: 2 percent tied to the current commitment and the remaining 3 percent to future orders.

Chinese outlet IT之家 describes the transaction as an expansion of cooperation to cover processor workloads. Akamai is set to meet Anthropic's growing demand for CPU work, not just accelerator chips. That distinction matters. The narrative around the AI boom usually focuses on graphics card power, yet much of the everyday operation of models, including data preparation, tool handling, and agent orchestration, remains CPU work.

The picture is clear. A lab that has yet to go public already carries multi-year obligations to an infrastructure supplier while securing ownership control for the post-IPO period. For investors, this is a double signal: predictable revenue for Akamai and less influence over board decisions for Anthropic's new shareholders.

Both threads, the voting structure and the computing power contract, come down to the same question: who controls a company going public? The arrangement with privileged shares is known from other technology firms. It allows founders to make long-term decisions without the pressure of quarterly reporting. Institutional investors increasingly ask whether such protection closes off their route to influencing strategy. The compromise described by The Information is an attempt to keep both sides at the table: founders keep the wheel, and shareholders get predictable, contractually secured revenue at the infrastructure supplier.