Anthropic wants to go public without handing founders the wheel

Anthropic is preparing to go public, but it does not intend to give up control. As The Information reported, the company asked shareholders to approve a structure in which chief executive Dario Amodei and six co-founders get special shares with a combined right to 50.1 percent of votes on most corporate matters. At least three of them must keep a minimum stake. The arrangement is not new, but at a company of this scale it means something different than at an ordinary startup. After the debut, nobody from outside should be able to outvote the direction the lab takes.

The second thread of the same puzzle is money for infrastructure. Akamai said Anthropic will spend 11.6 billion dollars over seven years on its cloud infrastructure. That is more than six times the 1.8 billion dollar deal Bloomberg wrote about in May. The commitment is not unconditional. It depends on Akamai meeting requirements for delivery and service availability.

On Akamai's side the amount translates into 5.5 billion dollars of additional capital expenditure. The two companies can extend the contract by up to another 9 billion dollars. Under the deal 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 to meet Anthropic's growing demand for CPU work, not only for accelerator chips. That distinction matters. The narrative around the AI boom usually counts graphics card power. Much of the everyday operation of models, including data preparation, tool handling and agent orchestration, is still CPU work.

The sum is unambiguous. A lab that has yet to go public already carries multi-year obligations to an infrastructure supplier, and at the same time secures ownership control for the period after the debut. For investors that 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 that is going public. The arrangement with privileged shares is known from other technology firms. It lets founders 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 The Information describes is therefore an attempt to keep both sides at the table: founders keep the wheel, and shareholders get predictable revenue, contractually secured, at the infrastructure supplier.