Anthropic is asking shareholders to approve a new corporate structure that would award chief executive Dario Amodei and his six co-founders a combined 50.1 percent of voting power, The Information reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the planning.
The new arrangement, which emulates a founder-control structure at Palantir, would award the co-founders a special class of shares giving them collective voting control in most corporate matters, and would apply as long as three of the seven co-founders retain a minimum number of shares in the company, according to the report.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
One significant exception to the founders' control is the election of the members on Anthropic's board, which has seven seats, one of which is currently vacant, according to the report.
The company is also planning to give employees a special class of stock that would serve as tie-breaker votes on some corporate issues, the report said.
Anthropic, which has been viewed for months as the leader in enterprise AI, is preparing for what could be one of the biggest IPOs on record.
The company could push its IPO to after the US midterm elections in November, with the poll not expected to have a major impact on the offering, Reuters reported earlier this month.
The Claude maker had raised US$65 billion (HK$507 billion) at a post-money valuation of US$965 billion in May.
Besides, Anthropic has committed to spending US$11.6 billion on cloud services from Akamai Technologies in its latest AI infrastructure deal, with the cloud company issuing a warrant that could give the AI lab a stake of up to 5 percent.
Under the seven-year contract, the warrant gives Anthropic the right to purchase Series B shares at US$111.33 each that converts into about 7.7 million shares of Akamai's common stock. Akamai shares jumped about 20 percent in extended trading on Thursday.
IPO-bound Anthropic has been aggressively expanding its computing power and securing the infrastructure needed to train and run increasingly powerful models, driving multibillion-dollar deals with cloud and data-center providers.
It agreed to spend US$45 billion to rent AI cloud computing power from Nscale's West Virginia data center campus, Reuters reported last month.
"Despite growing concerns about potential adverse consequences of agentic AI, infrastructure investment will continue to expand to support increasingly compute-intensive agentic workloads," said Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne.
The potential stake "can be seen as a vote of confidence in the durability of AI-driven cloud demand."
A portion of the warrant representing about 2 percent of Akamai's common stock outstanding is tied to Anthropic's US$11.6 billion commitment, while the remaining 3 percent would vest if the companies expand the agreement by up to another US$9 billion.
Akamai said the total capital expenditure related to the initial commitment is estimated to be about US$5.5 billion.
The deal adds to more than US$2.8 billion in multi-year cloud infrastructure commitments Akamai announced across its customer base this year.
The company expects no impact to its annual revenue forecast, and an increase of about US$1.7 billion in its 2026 capital spending to secure and pre-purchase components needed to support the agreement, including memory.
Separately, Akamai authorized electronics firm Jabil to purchase about US$1.7 billion worth of memory components under an existing services agreement.
Reuters and staff reporter
