Anthropic is considering super-voting shares to keep founders in control after going public. Dario Amodei wants a new share class that's never been added retroactively to a company, which critics see as a grab for near-godlike authority as the company approaches superintelligence.
Anthropic designed its mega IPO to keep the founders in control, where the company is reportedly considering super-voting shares that would preserve its founders' control after going public. Anthropic does already have an unusual super-control mechanism, but that control belongs in the hands of what's called the Long-Term Benefit Trust, not the founders.
If you rewind the tape to 30, 40 years ago, super-voting stock for any founder of any company was a complete no-no. And if you had it as a private company, you gave it up on IPO day. Then it became fashionable, you know, with Google IPO and Meta, and then all the Silicon Valley IPOs, they all had 10-for-1 super voting stock for the founders. But nobody's ever retroactively installed it as far as I can tell. I've never heard of it before. And so now Dario's taking it to the next level. Like, I started as this other entity with one class of voting stock with this social good mission. Now on the cusp of superintelligence, I want to be God. And, but you know, at 2%, he can't make himself God, so he has to share it with the other co-founders.
Or he's like, I know how to keep I know how to run this company, and I don't want to have someone else step in and redirect what we're doing.
He trusts himself to not destroy the world. And I think his track record supports that too, by the way. But then the idea of having total world control in the hands of a few people is also kind of like, wow, that's bizarre.
