Anthropic’s Big Charity Bill for Shareholders

When Anthropic shared financial figures recently with prospective investors in its planned initial public offering, it included a surprising glimpse of the enormous riches about to hit nonprofits and philanthropies—and the cost to shareholders.

The company reported a non-cash expense of more than $660 million for stock used to match employees’ charitable contributions in the six months from October 2025 to March 2026, investors said. That expense, which is already unusually large, will likely balloon into the billions of dollars in the coming quarters, after an IPO expected to create what could be an unprecedented wave of corporate donations.

The charges are tied to stock awards to employees that they pledge to charities that Anthropic matches with stock of its own. Anthropic executives have said the unusually generous matching program is an important recruiting tool, and they have emphasized how it underlines its public benefit mission. And it has become particularly valuable because of Anthropic’s rapidly rising private stock value.

The company matched stock earmarked for charities on a 3-to-1 basis for early employees, who joined in 2024 or earlier. Employees had the option to donate up to half their stock to charity as part of the program. For employees hired more recently, the company matches donations of up to a quarter of their stock on a 1-to-1 basis.

The enormous charitable costs, which also lead to dilution of investors’ stakes, reflect some of the unusual traits of a company whose IPO could rival that of SpaceX earlier this year as the biggest in history. Set to become the largest listed public benefit corporation in the U.S., Anthropic has built an image with the public and its own employees as a firm dedicated as much to the public interest as it is to pursuit of profit.

Chief Executive Dario Amodei and his six co-founders—already paper billionaires before the IPO—have all pledged to give away at least 80% of their wealth. (They aren’t eligible for the match.) And many of Anthropic’s employees are aligned with ideas of effective altruism, a loosely organized movement that aims to use rational thinking and philanthropy to solve under-addressed global problems—including the risks of AI tools like those Anthropic itself is building.

Anthropic’s charitable contributions for 2025 totaled $540 million, according to the figures shared with investors. That was far larger than the non-cash donations reported by any of the Fortune 500 companies in their securities filings, according to data from Calcbench, a financial analysis platform for investors. The firm studied which expenses were excluded from companies’ adjusted profitability metrics. The next highest in 2025 by that measure was financial giant BlackRock at $109 million. Other big companies’ similar charitable expenses are “trivial” compared to Anthropic’s, said Calcbench CEO Pranav Ghai.

Anthropic’s private valuation has soared from less than $20 billion two years ago to $965 billion this past May, and it is expected to jump to $1.5 trillion or more in the IPO.

Former Anthropic employees said employee group chats are filled with discussions of where they should give away the millions of dollars they expect to come their way from the IPO, including to groups that focus on global poverty, AI safety and animal welfare. “Some very rich people are going to give away a lot of money and the amount of money is pretty staggering,” a former employee said.

The gifts have a cost to Anthropic because of the match program. They dilute the ownership stakes of other shareholders by forcing the company to issue more stock. The contributions added to Anthropic’s operating loss in the two quarters reported to prospective investors. In the first quarter this year, the charitable contributions stood at about $125 million, and represented 10% of the company’s overall employee expenses and 2% of its operating costs overall. The figures for recent quarters couldn’t be learned.

Anthropic excluded the expense, along with stock-based compensation and a large legal settlement, from its adjusted operating profit for the periods. Companies typically present investors with adjusted profit metrics that exclude expenses they don’t pay in cash or aren’t likely to recur.

The charitable expense that Anthropic excluded was far larger than any large publicly traded firm that excluded a similar expense from their adjusted profit metrics. “The adjustment for charitable contributions is not common at all,” said Calcbench’s Ghai.

The expected boom in charitable giving from Anthropic’s IPO is likely to have ramifications beyond the costs to shareholders. Donations from employees who followed effective altruism are likely to give AI safety organizations equity in Anthropic, adding to ties that some prominent critics have already said are too cozy.