George Hammond in San Francisco
Sam Bankman-Fried will miss out on a windfall of close to $40bn when Anthropic goes public next week, after the disgraced co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX was forced to relinquish his huge stake in the company in 2024.
The ex-billionaire invested $500mn into Anthropic in 2021 via Alameda Research Ventures, the investment arm of his privately owned crypto trading firm. The deal gave Alameda a near 14 per cent stake in Anthropic, when the AI lab was worth only about $4bn.
Anthropic is on the cusp of one of the biggest public offerings, expected to list at about $1.5tn, or roughly $83 a share. A deal at that price would have valued Alameda’s stake at about $37bn, one of the biggest payouts from a venture deal of all time, according to FT calculations.
The lost Anthropic investment is one of a number of deals Bankman-Fried struck in 2021 and 2022, a period in which he was lavished with capital and praise from high-profile backers. In a hagiographic roughly 14,000-word profile, Sequoia Capital described the then 30-year-old as “highly mathletic” and possessing a “saviour complex”.
Bankman-Fried’s portfolio, including the Anthropic stake, was sold off to repay customers and creditors after his businesses collapsed into bankruptcy during the crypto market crash in 2022.
He was later convicted in the US on charges of fraud and money laundering for channelling billions of dollars in customer deposits from his FTX exchange to Alameda, which spent heavily on crypto and venture investments as well as marketing and celebrity endorsements.
Many of the bets by Alameda, in which Bankman-Fried owned a 90 per cent stake, would have made huge returns had the firm not been engulfed in one of the biggest fraud cases of all time.
Alameda invested $200,000 into Anysphere, maker of AI coding tool Cursor, in early 2022. Alameda’s exact stake was not disclosed, but the investment was a ‘pre-seed’ round made before the company publicly launched, and likely gave the firm a single-digit percentage ownership stake in Anysphere, said a person familiar with the matter.
