Anthropic is preparing to grant CEO Dario Amodei and other co-founders a special class of stock with enhanced voting rights ahead of the AI company’s potential initial public offering. The arrangement would allow the leadership team to retain significant control over corporate decisions even as their economic ownership stakes remain relatively small.

According to reports from Reuters via The Information, the specific voting arrangements have not been disclosed and plans could still change. Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Dual-Class Structure Mirrors Tech Giants

Dual-class share structures are common among founder-led technology companies, allowing executives to maintain voting power disproportionate to their equity holdings. At Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META), CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds about 60% of the company’s voting control through super-voting shares. Similarly, Space Exploration Technologies Corp (NASDAQ: SPCX) CEO Elon Musk retains significant voting power through a dual-class structure.

For Anthropic, this structure could protect Amodei and other founders from short-term shareholder demands. The move comes as the Claude maker prepares for what could rank among the largest market debuts ever.

Governance and Board Control

Anthropic is also reportedly planning to maintain its existing group of non-shareholder trustees through a special class of stock that would allow them to elect a majority of the company’s board. This reflects the company’s unusual governance structure as a public benefit corporation, which is legally required to balance commercial interests with social and public benefits.

Amodei reportedly owns only about 2% of Anthropic, making the proposed dual-class structure particularly significant for retaining influence. The company filed a confidential draft Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, preceding Sam Altman’s OpenAI, which submitted its own S-1 filing a week later.

What the Numbers Show

The divergence between Amodei’s reported 2% economic ownership and the proposed super-voting rights highlights a concentration of control typical in founder-led tech IPOs. This structure ensures that despite dilution from public listing, the founding team retains decisive authority over strategic direction and board composition, insulating long-term AI safety goals from immediate market pressures.

Macro investor Raoul Pal has publicly criticized Anthropic’s Claude AI model for severe performance issues, warning that the company faces a risk of customer attrition unless it rapidly expands its computing infrastructure.

Pal took to X on Monday to detail his experience, stating that the AI assistant had become difficult to use. He reported wasting hours on tasks that required approximately 30 minutes to complete, describing the service as "utterly unusable."

Performance and Usage Concerns

Pal highlighted specific technical failures in the model’s operation. He noted that the reasoning capabilities were flawed and that the system frequently failed to execute assigned tasks correctly.

The investor also pointed to restrictive usage limits as a barrier. Despite characterizing himself as "hardly a heavy user," Pal stated he exhausts his weekly credits by Monday. He specifically cited issues with the Opus 5 and Fable 5 models, describing the former negatively and complaining about the cost associated with the latter.

"They need more inference and fast or they’re gonna lose a lot of customers," Pal said, urging Anthropic to resolve the bottlenecks quickly.

Regulatory and Competitive Context

This criticism emerges amid broader disputes involving Anthropic’s leadership and market position. CEO Dario Amodei recently pushed back against investor Gavin Baker regarding views on AI regulation. Baker had claimed Amodei suggested Anthropic could eventually become the world’s only private company, a statement Anthropic employee Sholto Douglas called "completely false."

Additionally, Anthropic has faced security allegations in the competitive AI landscape. The company accused Chinese firms DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax of conducting industrial-scale distillation campaigns on Claude involving more than 24,000 accounts and 16 million interactions. Tesla CEO Elon Musk countered these claims by accusing Anthropic of having previously stolen training data at scale.