Crypto builders who have spent years inside DAO votes and multisig wallets see something familiar in Anthropic’s plan to keep its founders in charge after it goes public.
“I can’t stress enough how problematic this is as a governance experiment in what is maybe going to be, like, a multi-trillion dollar enterprise,” Kain Warwick, founder of Infinex and Synthetix, said on the Oct. 28 episode of Uneasy Money. Later in the segment, he put it more simply: “They basically tried to, like, invent a DAO.”
In the S-1 that Anthropic filed with the SEC on Oct. 26, a single share of Class F stock goes to a Founder LLC owned at the outset solely by the seven co-founders, including Dario and Daniela Amodei. That share holds 50.1% of the voting power and carries no economic rights.
Warwick said founder control alone was nothing new, citing the special share classes that let Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s founders steer their companies. His objection was to pooling the founders’ votes in one place that has to be coordinated. Anyone who expects that to work out, he said, “has just not been in crypto.”
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What If the Founders Split?
Austin Griffith, who works on builder enablement at the Ethereum Foundation, said on the show that “having seven people in charge is gonna slow that down,” adding that “we’ve learned that from DAOs.”
Warwick asked what happens if the bloc “doesn’t wanna vote together anymore.” The filing covers that case. Each continuing founder gets one vote, and a majority generally sets how the Class F share is cast. Without a majority, the share “will generally be voted proportionately with the votes of our Class A common stock cast on the matter.”
Most board seats are filled not by the founders but by the Long-Term Benefit Trust, a five-member body whose trustees hold no financial stake in the company. For the founders’ role, the filing argues that the seven of them “are distinctly equipped to be stewards of our mission,” free of “pressure to prioritize short-term results.” The filing also concedes the structure “has no direct public company precedent.”
Faith in the Business, Doubts About the Vote
Taylor Monahan, a security expert and co-host, separated the business from the governance. She said on the same episode that as long as Anthropic stays on “a somewhat sane, balanced trajectory,” “they’ll be able to make money eventually, like, without a doubt.” She placed the risk with the company’s own leadership: if it relies on “tried and true company organization,” she said, “I think that they’ll be fine.”
The S-1 leaves the price range blank, and no amendment had appeared on EDGAR as of Oct. 29. Unchained has also looked at whether crypto is overpricing Anthropic.
Related Listen: OpenAI Says It Cracked a Millennium Prize Problem. Why Is Anthropic Hitting the Brakes?
The post Kain Warwick Says Anthropic Tried to ‘Invent a DAO’ With Its Founder Voting Bloc appeared first on Unchained.
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