Anthropic Opens $6 Billion Employee Share Sale at $350 Billion - The Quiet Pre-IPO Signal

TL;DR

Anthropic is letting current and former employees sell shares at a $350 billion valuation, with $5-6 billion in total liquidity lined up from outside investors
The sale comes just 11 days after Anthropic closed a record $30 billion Series G at $380 billion post-money
Annualized revenue has rocketed from $1 billion (December 2024) to $14 billion (February 2026) - a 14x increase in 14 months
Anthropic has retained Wilson Sonsini for potential IPO preparation and added Chris Liddell (the man who ran GM's $23 billion IPO) to its board

Anthropic is opening the vault. The Claude maker has launched a secondary share sale that will allow eligible employees to cash out up to $6 billion worth of stock at a roughly $350 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg. Outside investors - not the company itself - are buying the shares.

The timing is deliberate. Anthropic closed the second-largest venture funding round in history just 11 days ago - $30 billion at a $380 billion post-money valuation, led by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and Coatue Management. Now it is giving the people who built Claude a chance to turn paper wealth into real money.

This is what a company looks like when it is getting ready to go public, whether it says so or not.

The Numbers Behind the Sale

Metric	Value
Share sale size	$5-6 billion
Share sale valuation	~$350 billion
Series G round (Feb 12)	$30 billion at $380 billion post-money
Series F round (Sep 2025)	$183 billion
Total raised since 2021	Over $57 billion
Annualized revenue (Feb 2026)	$14 billion
Claude Code ARR	$2.5 billion
Enterprise customers (>$100K/yr)	Up 7x year-over-year

The $350 billion secondary valuation is notably below the $380 billion post-money figure from the Series G. That is standard for secondary transactions - buyers demand a discount for shares that come without the governance rights and pro-rata protections baked into a primary round. The gap is small enough to suggest strong demand.

Who Can Sell

Eligibility is limited to current and former employees who have worked at Anthropic for at least 12 months. The final dollar amount depends on participation - not every eligible employee will choose to sell, and the company has not disclosed how many people qualify. But with over 1,500 employees and a roster of early engineers and researchers who joined at single-digit-billion valuations, the pool of potential sellers is large.

Who Benefits

The immediate beneficiaries are obvious: Anthropic employees who have been sitting on stock grants that were worth millions on paper but could not be converted to cash. In a private company, equity is a promise. Secondary sales make it real.

But the deal also serves Anthropic's strategic interests. The AI talent market in 2026 is brutally competitive. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI, and Meta are all competing for the same researchers and engineers. Letting staff cash out some of their holdings - without waiting for an IPO that may or may not happen this year - is a retention play dressed up as generosity.

Secondary share sales are an increasingly popular way for startups to give staff a way to benefit from a startup's valuation growth even without an acquisition or initial public offering.

The broader trend confirms this. A TechCrunch report from earlier this month noted that secondary sales have shifted from founder windfalls to employee retention tools, with secondary SPVs up 682% since 2023 and capital raised into those vehicles surging 1,340% year-to-date.

Who Pays

The outside investors buying Anthropic employee shares are taking a calculated bet. They are paying $350 billion for a company that generates $14 billion in annualized revenue - roughly a 25x revenue multiple. That is steep by traditional SaaS standards, but the growth trajectory is extraordinary.

Consider the revenue curve:

December 2024 - $1 billion annualized revenue
July 2025 - $4 billion annualized revenue
December 2025 - $9 billion annualized revenue
February 2026 - $14 billion annualized revenue

That is roughly a 14x increase in 14 months. Claude Code, which Bloomberg called the "surprise hit that made Anthropic into an AI juggernaut," now generates $2.5 billion in annualized recurring revenue on its own - more than doubling in under six weeks. Enterprise customers spending over $100,000 annually have grown sevenfold in the past year.

For secondary buyers, the bet is simple: if Anthropic maintains even a fraction of this growth rate into an IPO, the $350 billion entry price will look cheap.

The OpenAI Comparison

The closest parallel is OpenAI's $6.6 billion secondary sale in October 2025, which valued Sam Altman's company at $500 billion. OpenAI is now pursuing an even larger funding round that could exceed $100 billion at a potential $850 billion valuation.

Company	Secondary Sale	Valuation	Revenue (at time of sale)
Anthropic (Feb 2026)	$5-6 billion	$350 billion	$14 billion ARR
OpenAI (Oct 2025)	$6.6 billion	$500 billion	~$10 billion ARR

Anthropic's sale is comparable in size but at a lower multiple-to-revenue ratio, which arguably makes it a better deal for buyers.

The IPO Question

Anthropic says it has not decided when or whether it will go public. The evidence suggests otherwise.

In December, Anthropic retained Wilson Sonsini - the law firm that has shepherded more tech IPOs than perhaps any other - to prepare for a potential offering. More recently, the company added Chris Liddell to its board. Liddell served as CFO at both Microsoft and General Motors, and he is the architect who guided GM through its $23 billion IPO in 2010. You do not appoint an IPO specialist to your board because you are undecided about going public.

The $30 billion Series G itself tells the same story. The round was led by GIC and Coatue, with participation from D.E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ, MGX, plus strategic commitments from Microsoft (up to $5 billion) and Nvidia (up to $10 billion). That investor roster reads like a pre-IPO syndicate.

What Happens Next

The secondary sale is the latest move in a February that has been transformative for Anthropic. The company closed its record funding round, saw Claude Code Security rattle cybersecurity stocks, expanded Claude Opus 4.6 into enterprise workflows, and now opened the largest employee liquidity event in its history.

If Anthropic does file for an IPO later this year, this share sale will look like the dress rehearsal - a way to establish a market-clearing price, give employees a taste of liquidity, and signal to public-market investors that there is deep demand for Anthropic stock even at $350 billion.

The share sale is not the story. The story is that Anthropic is behaving exactly like a company that is about to go public, while carefully avoiding saying so - because the moment you say it, the clock starts ticking on SEC quiet periods, roadshow logistics, and a market window that could close at any time.

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