The US government sold seized Anthropic shares for $627 million in 2025. At a $1.5 trillion valuation, they would be worth about $3.94 billion, and victims have not been paid.
The US government sold Anthropic stock it had seized from two former executives tied to Sam Bankman-Fried for $627 million in October 2025. At the $1.5 trillion valuation used in the report, the same shares would be worth about $3.94 billion. That is six times the sale price. As of June, the $627 million had not gone to the FTX bankruptcy estate, court filings show.
Anthropic's S-1 filing on Monday revealed the sale. An S-1 is the paperwork a company files before offering its shares to the public. The filing says the government sold 4,453,900 Series B shares that had been forfeited, meaning taken by the government, in legal cases Anthropic was not part of. It does not name the former holders.
Business Insider reported earlier that the shares belonged to Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh. The share count matches the $50 million they paid in Anthropic's 2022 funding round at $11.2261 each.
Singh bought $40 million of the shares and Ellison bought $10 million. Both later pleaded guilty to crimes tied to their work with Bankman-Fried and testified against him. A jury found him guilty, and a judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison. The government owned the shares by April 2025. The US Marshals Service sold them instead of holding on to the stock.
Anthropic bought the shares from the government at $140.9676 each. That matches the price it set for a fundraising round a month earlier. Anthropic then resold them to nine investors for the same $627 million, so it made no profit. The filing does not say who the nine investors are.
The stake is about a quarter of a percent of Anthropic today. Anthropic has not announced a price for its expected November public offering, so the $3.94 billion figure is an illustration, not a real sale value.
Bankman-Fried's own Anthropic shares took a different path. They became part of FTX's bankruptcy estate, which sold them in 2024 for a total of $1.3 billion. That money went to creditors, including FTX customers and scammed investors.
For the $627 million, Justice Department prosecutors told a federal judge they would either run their own claims process or work with the FTX bankruptcy to find victims and pay them. No victim compensation fund has been announced. Experts say the government could also choose to keep the money.
The Justice Department and the US Marshals Service did not immediately comment.
A private company's shares can jump in value fast, and money seized in fraud cases can take a long time to reach the people who lost it.
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