Ben Kuhn answers If FTX is liquidated, who ends up controlling Anthropic?

[Ben Kuhn]

Is it likely that FTX/​Alameda currently have >50% voting power over Anthropic?

Extremely unlikely. While Anthropic didn’t disclose the valuation, it would be highly unusual for a company to take >50% dilution in a single funding round.

[stuhlmueller]

This paywalled article mentions a $4B valuation for the round:

[Robi Rahman]

In that case, FTX and other series B funders held about a 14% stake in Anthropic. If FTX is liquidated and someone ends up owning their share, what does it get them? A seat on the board?

[Jonathan Yan]

Why does Anthropic have a valuation at all? “Anthropic is a public benefit corporation”, according to its homepage. Is it still allowed then to distribute profits?

[Ofer]

Is it still allowed then to distribute profits?

Yes.

Daniela Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, said in an interview:

[...] And so what is a public benefit corporation? Why did we choose that structure?

So they’re fairly similar to C corporations, which is any form of standard corporate entity that you would encounter. And what that means is we can choose to focus on research and development, which is what we’re doing now, or on deployment of tools or products, including down the road for revenue purposes if we want to. But the major difference between a PBC and a C corporation is that in a public benefit corporation, we have more legal protections from shareholders if the company fails to maximize financial interests in favor of achieving our publicly beneficial mission. And so this is primarily a legal thing, but it also was very valuable for us in being able to just appropriately set expectations for investors and employees, that if financial profit and creating positive benefit for the world were ever to come into conflict, it was legally in place that the latter one would win.

[...]