Feds sold seized Anthropic shares back to insiders

The federal government seized Anthropic shares from Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh and sold them back to existing shareholders of the AI company, a stake that would be worth $4.17 billion to $5.03 billion today by one academic estimate. Business Insider reported the sale, citing a person familiar with it and previously unreported court records.

At a glance

• Ellison and Singh each bought into Anthropic's 2022 Series B, $10 million and $40 million respectively, and a judge ordered both to forfeit the stock, which prosecutors said could be considered proceeds of their crimes.
• The government took ownership of Ellison's shares in February 2025 and Singh's that April, and the Marshals Service later sold both blocks to existing Anthropic investors, according to a person familiar with the sale.
• Proceeds had not reached the FTX estate as of the end of June, according to bankruptcy filings, leaving open whether victims of the $11 billion fraud will see the money at all.

Criminal forfeiture is built to convert seized assets into cash, which works poorly when the asset is private stock in a company whose valuation multiplies while the paperwork moves. The timing choices made by the Marshals Service appear to have handed most of that upside to whichever Anthropic investors were allowed to buy in, while the FTX creditors counted as victims are still waiting. Distribution sits with the Justice Department rather than a court, which makes the outcome harder to follow from outside.

Bankman-Fried's own $500 million stake sold for $1.3 billion in the FTX bankruptcy

Bankman-Fried, convicted in 2023 of fraud and money laundering and sentenced to 25 years, put $500 million into Anthropic's 2022 Series B, a position court records show equalled 13.56% of the company at the time. The shares sat with Clifton Bay, an entity affiliated with Alameda Research, and went into bankruptcy court after FTX collapsed.

The estate sold them in 2024 to a few dozen buyers for $1.3 billion, more than double what he paid, with the largest block going to an entity affiliated with the United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund, according to bankruptcy filings. Successive funding rounds had diluted that Series B position to 7.84% by January 2024.

Anthropic went from $61.5 billion in March 2025 to $380 billion at its Series G

Anthropic was valued at $61.5 billion in its March 2025 Series E and at $380 billion in the Series G round at the start of 2026. In May the company announced a $965 billion valuation, and on the secondary market it has been valued at $1.5 trillion, making it the most valuable private company in the world according to Crunchbase.

Olav Sorenson, who teaches venture capital strategy at UCLA, put Ellison's and Singh's combined stake at $4.17 billion to $5.03 billion today, based on the $965 billion valuation. Harrison Rolfes, an analyst at PitchBook, put the combined figure at $2.62 billion, and at about $5.44 billion if Anthropic went public at $2 trillion.

Valued at the time of the 2025 sale rather than today, the shares would have been worth $300 million to $1.1 billion by Sorenson's estimate and $250 million to $630 million by Rolfes's, depending on when in the year the Marshals Service completed the transaction.

Millions of potential victims pushed compensation into a DOJ-run remission process

Prosecutors said the number of potential FTX victims could run into the millions, and the judge ruled that compensation would go through remission, a process overseen by the Justice Department rather than by a court. At Ellison's sentencing, prosecutors said the department would either build its own claims administration process or work with the FTX bankruptcy to identify victims.

The proceeds do not appear to have reached the FTX estate as of the end of June, according to filings from the estate, which continues to pay creditors. The estate received $638 million from Justice Department seizures last year, nearly all of it from Bankman-Fried's Robinhood shares, and expects about $400 million more.

How the payout gets decided

Duncan Levin, who teaches forfeiture at Harvard Law School, said the process is opaque and "completely at the discretion, by law, of the attorney general of the United States." The Justice Department said the matter is ongoing and that it prioritizes victim compensation from forfeiture.

The sale price, the buyers and the exact date remain undisclosed. Sunil Kavuri, an FTX victim who advocates for creditors, said it would be "diabolical" for the government to keep the proceeds; Singh's attorney said his client hopes for quick distribution to victims.