Written by: Xiaobing, Deep Tide TechFlow

On April 8th, Bloomberg reported that the employee stock transfer transaction (tender offer) for Anthropic was completed last week. The valuation is equal to that of the Series G financing in February of this year, with a pre-money valuation of 350 billion dollars (excluding the 30 billion dollars raised).

The transaction itself was not surprising; what was unexpected was the result: Investors prepared 5 billion to 6 billion dollars to take over, but the final transaction amount fell far short of the upper limit. It wasn't due to a lack of buyers, but rather a lack of sellers. Anthropic's employees looked at the stocks in their hands, and most chose not to sell.

What are the 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 is approximately 9 billion dollars. By the Series G financing in February 2026, CFO Krishna Rao announced a figure of 14 billion dollars. Sacra's estimates are even more aggressive: by March, annualized revenue had surpassed 30 billion dollars, exceeding OpenAI’s 25 billion. Three years ago, this company just started generating revenue, and its annualized revenue has maintained over 10 times growth for three consecutive years.

The second is IPO expectations. Bloomberg reported in March that Anthropic is in discussions with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley for underwriting, aiming to go public on NASDAQ as early as October this year, with a fundraising scale potentially exceeding 60 billion dollars. The valuation range is between 400 billion and 500 billion.

The arithmetic for employees is simple: selling stock today at a 350 billion valuation could mean the company goes public at a valuation over 400 billion in six months. Selling too early means giving the appreciation space to the investors taking over. Moreover, in California, this year’s capital gains tax rate from selling stocks could exceed 50%. Selling at the beginning of the year has the advantage of leaving ten months for tax planning, but many employees clearly feel that this advantage is not enough to offset the potentially higher prices they may get by holding on until after the IPO.

A signal at the industry level

The tender offer for Anthropic is not an isolated case. In October 2025, OpenAI had just completed a 6.6 billion dollar employee stock transfer at a valuation of 500 billion dollars. One interesting detail of that transaction is that OpenAI initially approved a maximum allocation of 10.3 billion dollars, but employees only sold two-thirds of that. The remaining one-third was also kept by OpenAI employees.

SpaceX, Stripe, and Databricks are doing similar things. For super unicorns that choose not to go public in the long term, regular employee stock transfers have become standard practice, serving both as a retention tool and a valuation anchoring method.

However, the degree of reluctance to sell seen in this instance with Anthropic is particularly evident even within this group. Revenue is growing rapidly, the IPO is on the agenda, and the overall valuation in the AI industry is still on an upward trajectory. With these three expectations combined, employees have no reason to rush to cash out.

Why do a tender offer after a 30 billion round of financing?

On February 12, Anthropic just closed a 30 billion dollar Series G financing, led by GIC and Coatue, with D.E. Shaw, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ, and MGX participating. This is the second-largest private financing in tech history, second only to OpenAI's more than 40 billion last year.

The company is not short on cash. So why do a tender offer?

Because the money raised for the company's accounts and the money in the employees' pockets are two different things. Anthropic's early employees, especially those who left OpenAI in 2021 to follow Dario and Daniela Amodei to start the company, have options and RSUs that have already gained considerable paper value. But until the company goes public, these are just paper riches. The tender offer is the only legal channel to turn that paper into cash.

This is also part of the talent competition in AI. It’s no longer news that Meta offers nine-figure compensation packages to poach AI researchers. If employees' stocks cannot be monetized, even a high paper value won't retain people. Anthropic needs to provide employees with a regular cashing-out window while maintaining team stability. In the end, the window opened, and most people looked at the scenery outside but then closed it again.

What does this mean for the market?

From an investor's perspective, Anthropic's tender offer being underfilled creates an interesting situation of information asymmetry.

The buyers have the money. Bloomberg's report used the phrase "some investors weren't able to pick up as many shares as they planned." There is abundant capital supply, but the available Anthropic equity supply in the secondary market is extremely scarce. On secondary trading platforms like EquityZen and Forge, Anthropic's implied valuation has already 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 price of 350 billion, the pricing in the public market will only be higher. Of course, the premise is that the macro environment does not significantly deteriorate. Given the current situation with the U.S.-Iran war, escalating tariffs, and increased volatility in U.S. stocks, this premise is not guaranteed.

Another angle worth noting is the way revenue is recognized. Anthropic counts all sales generated through AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure channels as its income, treating the share going to cloud service providers as sales costs. OpenAI uses the net method for Azure sales, only accounting for its own share. The same business generates vastly different revenue numbers due to these two accounting methods. Bank of America estimates that the fees Anthropic pays to cloud service providers could reach as high as 6.4 billion dollars by 2026. If the SEC requires uniformity in reporting before the IPO, that annualized revenue number of 30 billion could shrink significantly.

However, these are the headaches for investment banks during the IPO roadshow. For a broader group of AI investors, the information conveyed by this tender offer can actually be summed up in one sentence: Anthropic's stock, priced at 350 billion dollars, has some who want to buy but can't get enough, and some who can sell but are unwilling to sell. In the primary AI market, this kind of seller's advantage is becoming increasingly common.