Anthropic to buy back employee shares at $61.5 billion valuation

Amazon- and Google-backed AI startup Anthropic is planning its first-ever employee share buyback, a move that signals how competitive the war for AI talent has become amid record valuations and surging investor interest in frontier model companies.

According to a report by Silicon Valley tech publication The Information, Anthropic will repurchase shares from current and former employees at a valuation of $61.5 billion—the same figure at which it recently closed a $3.5 billion Series E round. The offering will give employees the chance to liquidate a portion of their equity while allowing the company to retain top performers in an increasingly aggressive hiring environment.

The startup, founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI executives including Dario Amodei, has seen its valuation skyrocket over the past year. In March 2024, it was valued at $15 billion, and by the end of the year had reached over $60 billion following back-to-back mega-funding rounds from strategic investors such as Google, Amazon, and Salesforce Ventures.

Employee liquidity programmes like these are becoming more common across high-growth AI companies, where competition for researchers and engineers is fierce. Anthropic’s flagship product, the Claude chatbot, has emerged as a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and is gaining traction among enterprise customers for its emphasis on safety and transparency.

The company’s annualised revenue run rate touched $1 billion by the end of 2024, The Information report noted, up from about $100 million at the start of the year. Its rapid growth and aggressive hiring goals have forced it to offer more than just high salaries—including equity options with near-term liquidity events like this buyback.

The buyback programme comes at a time when many late-stage startups are struggling to balance valuations with internal morale, especially in sectors not experiencing the same capital influx as generative AI.