Key Takeaways
There's no universal answer to how much Anthropic stock you should hold. The right amount depends on your financial independence, other assets, personal goals, and how much risk you're comfortable taking.
Selling stock doesn't have to mean losing conviction in Anthropic. Diversifying a portion of your wealth can create the financial freedom to continue taking meaningful risks elsewhere in your life.
An IPO creates opportunities and tax-planning decisions. Understanding your RSUs, potential tax liabilities, lockup restrictions, and available strategies before liquidity arrives can make a meaningful difference.
Your wealth can be an extension of your values. Charitable giving, impact investing, and thoughtful long-term planning can help turn financial success into the change you want to see in the world.
In This Article
What the S-1 Tells Us About Anthropic
Your Lockup and Your 2026 Tax Bill
Managing Concentrated Stock: Lessons From Institutional Risk Management
How Much Is Enough?
Setting a Target for Your Anthropic Stock
Considerations for HR, Sales, Legal, and Marketing Employees
Charitable Giving and Investing With Your Values
Tools for Diversifying Tax-Efficiently
Earlier this year, Shane Mason and I spoke to about 100 financial advisors at XYPN LIVE about equity compensation. Everyone in that room came to get better at helping employees through the kind of moment Anthropic's team is heading into now.
Building that presentation reminded us how differently these stories can end. In the 8 years we've worked with employees at companies going public, we've learned there's no standard IPO. The same decision can look brilliant or painful depending on where you happened to work.
Airbnb is one of the happier examples. It priced its IPO at $68 in December 2020 and closed its first day at $144.71. Certain shareholders could sell up to 15% of their shares in the first 7 trading days, so the people who used that window turned part of their equity into cash at more than double the IPO price. Airbnb trades around $171 today*.
Figma went the other way. It priced at $33 in July 2025 and closed its first day at $115.50. When the 180-day employee lockup lifted in February 2026, the stock was trading near $22, which is about where it sits today*. By the time employees could act, most of what they'd seen on paper was gone.
Both groups worked hard at companies they believed in. What separated them was the structure of their lockup and whether they had a plan before the shares were theirs to sell.
Anthropic filed its S-1 on October 26, 2026, and its lockup looks more like Airbnb's than a traditional 6-month wait. Many employees will be able to sell up to 10% of their locked-up shares when trading begins, so the first real decision arrives on day one. Before the listing, we'd ask the question we ask every family with this much wealth in one stock: how much is enough?
What the S-1 tells us about the investment
Anthropic plans to list its Class A shares on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. According to its amended S-1, revenue reached $33.2 billion in the first nine months of 2026, compared with $2.5 billion in the same period of 2025. The company posted its first operating profit, $974 million, in the second quarter of 2026, then returned to an operating loss of $567 million in the third quarter, which it attributes mainly to costly short-term compute and non-cash charges from its donation matching program. Operating cash flow was $6.6 billion for the first nine months of the year, compared with $2.0 billion of cash used a year earlier.
Fast growth doesn't remove valuation risk, though. A company can do extraordinarily well while its stock disappoints, because what matters is how much future growth is already priced in. The S-1 acknowledges that recent growth rates may not last, and it describes long-term computing commitments that could be hard to adjust if demand or competition shifts. Yardeni Research added up the minimum payments under those contracts and estimates roughly $800 billion due over the next eight years, and the filing notes that significant payments will come well before the related compute is up and running. With no price range set yet, we can't judge the valuation.
Public shareholders will also have limited say. Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust generally elects a majority of the board, and a founder-controlled entity is expected to hold 50.1% of the voting power on most shareholder matters.
Believing in a company's future and deciding how much of your own future rides on its stock are two separate decisions. The filing is a good reminder of that.
Your lockup and your 2026 tax bill
If you're like most of the Anthropic employees we expect to hear from, your equity is mostly RSUs. Once RSUs have met their service vesting, they settle at the IPO, and their full value is taxed as ordinary income in 2026, the same way a bonus would be. Your grant documents will confirm exactly how this works for you.
The S-1 lays out a staged lockup for non-founder directors, officers, and certain current and former employees. Up to 10% of covered shares can be sold when trading begins, and up to another 35% after Anthropic releases its full-year 2026 results. The rest is released after first-quarter 2027 earnings or on the 180th day, whichever comes first. Terms can change in an amended filing and differ by holder group, so confirm which schedule applies to you.
That day-one window matters for taxes, because withholding on a large vest usually comes up short. Federal withholding on supplemental wages is 22% on the first $1 million in a year and 37% above that, while most of an IPO-sized vest is taxed at 35% or 37%. California withholds 10.23% on supplemental wages, which is below its top rate. If Anthropic lets you choose a higher federal rate, as Airbnb did at its IPO, that choice deserves real thought.
Here's how that can play out. Say you're single, earn a $350,000 salary, and $3 million of RSUs settle at the IPO. Federal withholding on the RSUs would be about $960,000. Because nearly all of that $3 million lands in the 35% and 37% brackets, the federal tax on it is roughly $1.1 million, which leaves around $145,000 not covered. California adds a gap of roughly $80,000, so you'd owe about $225,000 beyond what was withheld.*
Setting aside cash from that first 10% to cover the gap is the simplest plan we know. Waiting to sell in April means counting on the shares still being worth what you owe on them.
There's a second piece that surprises people. Once your RSUs settle, your tax basis is their value at settlement, and you owe the ordinary income tax whether you sell or hold. So selling soon afterward adds very little tax. The instinct to hold so you don't “hand millions to the IRS” applies mainly to growth after the IPO.
What institutional risk management taught me about concentrated stock
Before co-founding Mana, I spent six years in investment risk management at Man Group, one of the world's largest publicly traded alternative investment managers. I did due diligence on hedge fund managers, which meant asking how their risk controls would hold up when markets turned and how many funds in one portfolio would fall at the same time. Before that, I audited hedge funds at PwC during the 2008 financial crisis.
Consider an Anthropic employee with $15 million in company stock and $2 million in diversified investments. Nearly 90% of their invested wealth depends on one company, and their salary and future grants probably do too. Risk management trained me to ask what happens to a life like that if the stock doesn't cooperate*.
Sometimes holding wins. Planet Labs went public through a SPAC at $10 in 2021, fell below $2 in 2024, and climbed back to over $40/share by mid-2026. The employees who held on, and sold when the opportunity arose, were vindicated.
So we treat this as a trade-off between concentration and taxes, decided person by person. One question I find useful: if you had $15 million in cash today, would you put all of it into Anthropic? If the answer is no, ask yourself why holding $15 million of shares feels more comfortable.
How much is enough?
When we work with families whose wealth sits in a single stock, we start with 3 questions.
What amount protects your family? This is the foundation: the diversified, after-tax wealth that would let your family feel secure no matter what happens to Anthropic. For one family the number is $5 million. For another it's $15 million or more.
What amount lets you reach your goals? Maybe you want to start a company, take a year off, buy a second home, or spend more time with your kids. Money you need next year should be invested differently from money meant for a goal 20 years out.
What amount supports the impact you want to have? For a lot of people, the most meaningful use of wealth is what it can do now: substantial giving, funding research, supporting organizations they believe in, or helping family.
Without answers to these questions, there's always another milestone. If $20 million of stock becomes $40 million, will that be enough, or will you start picturing $60 million? In our experience, the first several million that give you real security mean more than the additional millions that mostly raise your net worth.
Pick a target percentage and stick to it
Our happiest clients commit to holding a specific percentage of their net worth in company stock, and no more. A target takes the emotion out of deciding when to sell or hold. When the stock has a strong run, you trim back to the target and diversify the rest, and when it falls, you already know what you're going to do.
Anthropic's staged lockup gives you natural checkpoints for this: day one, after the full-year 2026 results, and the final release. If you’re able to use a 10b5-1 plan, a pre-set selling schedule that runs on autopilot, it suits a target-percentage approach well.
If you work in HR, sales, legal, or marketing at Anthropic
Many of our clients work in these fields, and a few patterns come up often enough to share. One applies to all four. If you joined in the last couple of years, your grants likely came at a higher valuation, so your gain may be smaller than an early engineer’s while your concentration risk is just as real. Your unvested RSUs will also keep settling after the IPO on their regular schedule, which adds company stock to your net worth every time they settle unless you have a plan for selling down.
If you’re on an HR or people team, you’ll likely spend the weeks around the IPO answering everyone else’s questions about withholding, lockups, and trading windows. You know the plan better than almost anyone, which makes it easy to put your own decisions last. Before trading begins, settle your withholding election and how many of your day-one shares you’ll sell, so your own plan is in place while you’re helping everyone else.
In sales, your commissions and your stock depend on the same thing, which is demand for AI. A strong year can lift both, and a slowdown can hit both at once. That’s the kind of correlation I spent years measuring at Man Group, and it’s a reason to keep your target percentage in company stock modest. An RSU settlement stacked on a big commission year also pushes more of your income into the top brackets, so plan for estimated tax payments early.
If you work in legal, you may face preclearance requirements, tighter trading windows than your colleagues, and, if you use one, the rules around a 10b5-1 plan. Under SEC rules, those plans come with a cooling-off period before the first sale, generally 30 days for employees and longer for directors and officers. They also have to be adopted when you aren’t aware of material nonpublic information, which can be harder to time when your job puts you close to it. The plan you set up today decides what you can sell weeks from now, so start early.
And if you’re in marketing, you spend your days telling Anthropic’s story, and you probably believe it. That belief is part of what makes you good at the job, and it’s also why the $15 million question above deserves an honest answer.
Giving shares, and giving closer to home
According to the S-1, each of Anthropic’s seven co-founders has committed to giving 80% of their Anthropic equity to charity, and the company runs an equity donation matching program that matches employee pledges with additional shares. Anthropic also contributed 5% of its diluted shares to the new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund. If you’ve been thinking about giving, how you do it will shape how far your gifts go.
Our clients are giving more too. In this K-shaped economy, many employees with equity comp are sitting on big gains while people around them face layoffs and tighter budgets. Our clients are responding by supporting causes they’ve researched carefully and people close to home.
The best-known move is donating appreciated stock. If you’ve held shares for more than a year, giving them to a charity or donor-advised fund generally lets you avoid the capital gains tax and deduct their full market value, up to 30% of your AGI, with a five-year carryforward for the rest. With RSUs, the one-year holding period starts the day after vesting, so shares you receive at the IPO won’t qualify until late 2027. If you give them sooner, the deduction is the lower of your cost basis or the current fair market value, which for recently settled shares works out about the same as giving cash. Bruce Brumberg’s recent Forbes article, How To Donate Stock When You’re Not A Billionaire, walks through these rules in more detail.
If you plan to give Anthropic shares, find out how the company’s matching program works before you decide where to give. Matching programs usually have their own rules about which organizations qualify, whether gifts to donor-advised funds count, and how much is matched, and those rules can change which giving strategy makes the most sense.
The IPO year is still a strong year to give, with two new wrinkles. Starting in 2026, itemizers can deduct only the charitable gifts above 0.5% of AGI, and for people in the 37% bracket, the tax benefit of itemized deductions is capped at 35%. Bunching several years of giving into a donor-advised fund in a high-income year means you clear that floor once, and you can still grant the money to charities over time. For a 2026 deduction, the shares have to arrive at the charity by December 31, and a transfer you approve on December 30 may not land in time, so start early.
Giving to family works a little differently. We’ve seen clients support siblings, parents, and adult children who’ve lost jobs. In 2026 you can give up to $19,000 per person ($38,000 for married couples splitting gifts) without filing a gift tax return. If you give appreciated shares to a relative in a lower bracket, they may be able to sell at a 0% long-term capital gains rate, as long as your combined holding period is more than a year. The kiddie tax can apply to children under 19 and full-time students under 24.
Investing in a way that reflects your values
You can diversify out of Anthropic and still invest according to your values. Our impact portfolios weigh environmental, social, and governance factors alongside traditional investment fundamentals, using diversified funds that consider things like environmental sustainability and corporate responsibility.
Impact means something different to almost every client we work with. For one person it's climate, and for another it's avoiding weapons manufacturing or certain defense-related businesses. So we start with what impact means to you and build a portfolio that reflects those views, using separately managed accounts when you want to get more specific. If you're moving money out of an AI company, we'll also look at how much AI and tech exposure the new portfolio adds back.
Matching a diversified portfolio to every one of your values is hard, and exclusions can affect diversification and returns. We'd rather talk through those trade-offs with you up front, so you know what you own and why.
Tools for diversifying tax-efficiently
For someone with $5 million to $25 million in company stock, the answer usually involves several strategies working together. We decide how much risk you want to remove first, then use these tools to manage the tax cost.
Direct indexing. We build a diversified portfolio of individual stocks, which gives you broad-market exposure with more room to harvest tax losses and to underweight businesses that share Anthropic's AI and technology risks. For larger portfolios with ongoing gains, tax-aware long/short strategies can widen the set of losses available, with added risks that include short selling, financing costs, and potential underperformance. Tax losses are never guaranteed.
Options. Protective puts and collars can limit downside while keeping some upside, at the cost of premiums, capped gains, or both. They depend on a listed options market for ANT and on Anthropic's trading policy, and some structures can trigger constructive-sale rules. Lockup agreements commonly restrict hedging too, so these tools usually come later.
Borrowing against your shares. A securities-backed line of credit gives you cash without a sale and works best for short-term needs with a clear repayment plan. Against one concentrated stock, a sharp drop can trigger a margin call at the worst possible moment.
Estate planning. For families with more wealth than they'll need in their lifetime, certain trusts and lifetime gifts can move future growth to heirs or charities. We partner with trust and estate attorneys to put these plans in place, so your investments, taxes, giving, and estate plan work together.
What happens next
It's entirely reasonable to be optimistic about Anthropic and still sell a meaningful amount of stock. It's just as reasonable to keep real exposure while protecting the parts of your life that couldn't absorb a 50% drop. The right answer depends on what you want your wealth to do.
Anthropic's IPO may be the event that creates your wealth, but the decisions you make afterward will determine what that wealth makes possible.
If you'd like help thinking through those decisions before the listing, we'd be glad to talk. Schedule a conversation with Mana.
Important information
This article is provided for educational purposes only and does not constitute individualized investment, legal, or tax advice. All investments involve risk, including possible loss of principal. Strategies discussed may not be appropriate or available for all investors. Direct indexing and tax-loss harvesting do not guarantee tax savings or investment returns. Options, short selling, and securities-backed borrowing involve additional risks. Impact-oriented investing may affect portfolio diversification and performance and does not guarantee particular social or environmental outcomes. Charitable and gift tax benefits depend on individual circumstances and applicable law. Hypothetical examples do not represent actual client results or projected investment performance. Past performance of any security discussed does not guarantee future results.
Sources: Anthropic, PBC, Form S-1 filed October 26, 2026, and Amendment No. 1 filed November 2, 2026, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; Yardeni Research, Morning Briefing, October 29, 2026; Bruce Brumberg, “How To Donate Stock When You’re Not A Billionaire,” Forbes, October 27, 2026; myStockOptions.com, “Are there ways around a lockup?” (Airbnb early-release terms); Airbnb IPO pricing from NPR, December 10, 2020. Figma and Planet Labs share prices from YCharts. Prices as of November 2, 2026.
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Stephanie Bucko and Cristina Livadary are fee-only financial planners based in Los Angeles, California. Stephanie is the Chief Investment Officer and Cristina is the Chief Executive Officer at Mana Financial Life Design (FLD). Mana FLD provides comprehensive financial planning and investment management services to help clients grow and protect their wealth throughout life’s journey. Mana FLD specializes in advising ambitious professionals who seek financial knowledge and want to implement creative budgeting, savings, proactive planning and powerful investment strategies. As fee-only fiduciaries and independent financial advisors, Stephanie and Cristina never receive commission of any kind. Stephanie and Cristina are legally bound by their certifications to provide unbiased and trustworthy financial advice.