According to reports from The Information, Anthropic is considering requiring all rank-and-file employees to sell stock through preset trading plans after going public to address insider-trading concerns. The Claude code creator is racing to go public alongside rival OpenAI, as investor appetite for artificial intelligence drives soaring valuations and companies compete to establish benchmarks for valuing frontier AI firms. Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft registration statement, known as Form S-1, to the SEC around June 1, 2026, positioning the company for a potential public listing later this year. The company's Series H funding round reportedly valued it at $965 billion post-money, with run-rate revenues exceeding $47 billion. Financial advisory firms working with Anthropic employees have already been recommending that workers voluntarily adopt 10b5-1 plans, with advisors noting that all employees could potentially be treated as insiders subject to trading restrictions. As reported by The Information, discussions among Anthropic officials and outside advisers are ongoing, and it could not be learned whether the company has made a final decision on implementing these mandatory arrangements.
As reported by The Information, all Anthropic employees might be required to use 10b5-1 trading plans, which mandate stock sales according to preset schedules and are typically utilized only by top executives and certain finance and legal staff. The plans would require employees to sell shares according to preset schedules specifying the timing, amount and price of stock sales, according to the report. The logic behind these mandatory plans is straightforward: IPO processes involve extended blackout windows where insiders can't trade, and having a pre-scheduled plan in place means employees don't have to sit on their hands wondering when they'll be able to access liquidity. These arrangements aim to prevent insider trading concerns for all staff members, particularly given that even an engineer's knowledge about model capabilities could constitute material non-public information in a frontier AI company. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment regarding these potential arrangements.
The SEC Rule 10b5-1 has undergone significant updates in 2022, adding mandatory cooling-off periods between when a plan is adopted and when the first trade can execute. The updated rules also require executives to certify in good faith that they don't possess material non-public information when setting up their plans. For a company like Anthropic, where employees may hold equity worth life-changing sums, these plans serve a dual purpose - protecting individual employees from accidental violations and protecting the company from reputational damage that comes with insider trading investigations. The whole point is to create a paper trail proving employees weren't trading on inside information when the sale actually happens.
As noted in the The Information report, public companies typically allow most employees to sell shares during trading windows following earnings reports. However, preset trading plans could allow sales outside those windows while limiting employees' discretion over the timing and size of trades, potentially providing more structured access to liquidity for employees. The conservative interpretation of treating the entire workforce as potential insiders reflects the reality that in a company building frontier AI systems, even basic knowledge about model capabilities could constitute material non-public information. In many pre-IPO companies, insider status is limited to executives and employees with direct access to financial data, making Anthropic's approach unusually aggressive for a pre-IPO company. Anthropic is also weighing how much stock existing shareholders can sell on the first day of trading and the length of post-IPO lockup periods, according to the latest reports.
