Sam Bankman-Fried Circle's Anthropic Shares Sold Before Value Exploded - Startup Fortune

Federal prosecutors seized personal Anthropic stakes from Sam Bankman-Fried's inner circle, including Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh, as part of their criminal sentencing in 2024. Those shares got sold off alongside FTX's own $500 million stake, years before Anthropic's valuation rocketed to $965 billion.

Nishad Singh paid $40,000 for early Anthropic stock in 2022, then forfeited it as a convicted felon before it could turn into a fortune. The shares seized from Sam Bankman-Fried's inner circle were sold off in 2024, right before Anthropic's valuation exploded past $965 billion.

Anthropic closed a $65 billion funding round at a $965 billion valuation on May 28, 2026, according to the company's own announcement and reporting from NBC News and TechCrunch. That number sits on top of a strange footnote from the FTX collapse. Some of the earliest money into Anthropic came from Sam Bankman-Fried and the people who ran his fraud alongside him, and a slice of what they personally held in the AI company was seized by federal prosecutors and folded into the pool of assets used to repay FTX's victims.

The story actually splits into two separate stakes, and conflating them is where most retellings go wrong.

The first stake was corporate. In April 2022, Bankman-Fried personally led Anthropic's Series B round and wrote a $500 million check through Alameda Research and FTX, buying roughly 8% of the company. That was FTX's institutional position. Once the exchange collapsed that November, it became bankruptcy estate property. The estate sold the bulk of it in March 2024 for $884 million, with Abu Dhabi's ATIC Third International Investment Company as the largest buyer, alongside Jane Street, HOF Capital, the Ford Foundation and funds managed by Fidelity, according to CNBC. A second tranche went for $452 million that June. Combined, FTX's own stake fetched roughly $1.3 billion.

The second stake was personal, and it's the one prosecutors actually forfeited as criminal punishment. Caroline Ellison, the former Alameda CEO who testified against Bankman-Fried, personally held about $10 million worth of Anthropic shares. That stake became the core asset behind her settlement obligations when she was sentenced to two years in prison in September 2024 and ordered to forfeit $11 billion jointly with her co-conspirators. Nishad Singh, FTX's former director of engineering, held Anthropic Series B preferred stock he'd bought through a SAFE for exactly $40,000 in May 2022. Court records tied to his October 2024 sentencing, where he avoided prison entirely after cooperating extensively with prosecutors, list that stake among the assets he agreed to give up, alongside a house and his crypto holdings.

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Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, proposing a one-time 50 percent equity tax on OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI that would give the federal government board seats and voting shares. The bill dropped the same day Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO, forcing the industry to treat legislative risk as a... - how to price a SaaS product for enterprise - cold email template that gets replies from investors

Those forfeited personal shares never sat in a government vault waiting for Anthropic's valuation to climb. They got swept into the same FTX estate asset pool as the corporate stake and sold off in the 2024 tranches, years before anyone was calling Anthropic a trillion-dollar company in waiting.

Who actually captured the upside

That timing is the real story here. Anthropic was valued around $18 billion when Bankman-Fried wrote his check in 2022. By the time FTX's estate liquidated its position in 2024, the company's climb had turned $500 million into $1.3 billion, a decent return on paper. But Anthropic didn't stop there. It raised money at a $183 billion valuation in September 2025, signed a term sheet for $350 billion that January, closed a $30 billion round at $380 billion in February 2026, and then closed a $65 billion Series H at $965 billion on May 28, 2026, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, with run-rate revenue above $47 billion. The company has flagged October 2026 as its target window for an IPO, according to reporting from Forbes and TechCrunch.

Run that same appreciation against the 8% stake FTX sold off in 2024, and it would be worth somewhere north of $77 billion today, a figure that's circulated widely in coverage of the case. Nobody at FTX, and nobody in Bankman-Fried's inner circle, captured that gain. Abu Dhabi's sovereign fund did. So did Jane Street and Fidelity's funds.

The government didn't get rich off this either. Prosecutors' job was to make victims whole as fast as the process allowed, not to speculate on where AI valuations were headed next. Selling in 2024 rather than holding was the legally sound call, even if it looks, in hindsight, like selling Amazon stock in 1998.

Frankly, that's the real lesson here, not that the government "accidentally became an Anthropic investor." It didn't. It forfeited stolen property, converted it to cash as fast as the law allowed, and handed that money to the roughly one million customers FTX defrauded. The asymmetry in this story is real. It's just not the one most people assume. It wasn't the government or Sam Bankman-Fried's circle who got rich off Anthropic's rise. It was whoever had the balance sheet to buy a distressed AI stake in 2024, and the patience to hold it through 2026.

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