US Gov Lost $4.7 Billion By Selling FTX’s Anthropic Shares Early

The US Marshals Service sold Anthropic shares seized from two FTX executives during 2025. Anthropic tripled in value that same year.

Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh invested $50 million in the company in 2022. Both of them directly helped FTX funnel customer funds through a backdoor and into private investments. A judge stripped them of the stake after they pleaded guilty.

The Year Anthropic Tripled

Ellison paid $10 million while Singh paid $40 million, and both ended up holding Series B preferred stock. A federal judge signed Ellison’s final forfeiture order on February 18, 2025, court records show.

Singh’s followed in April, and the Marshals then sold both blocks to investors already on Anthropic’s cap table.

Timing mattered enormously, because Anthropic closed a round at a $61.5 billion valuation on March 3, 2025. Six months later, it closed another round at $183 billion.

Anthropic's valuation timeline: • 2021: Founded • 2023: $4.1 billion • 2024: $18.5 billion • Mar 2025: $61.5 billion • Sep 2025: $183 billion • Nov 2025: $350 billion • Feb 2026: $380 billion • May 2026: $965 billion https://t.co/N4Uandb6Cb

— Polymarket Money (@PolymarketMoney) June 9, 2026

Nobody outside government knows which side of that jump the sale landed on. The price, the buyers, and the date all remain secret.

The US government’s move to sell Anthropic shares saw them miss out on significant gains, much like what SBF did with several shares of multiple companies, including Anthropic itself.

“Sam Bankman-Fried is the greatest investor of all time…That means if he weren’t in jail today and still owned all this equity, he’d be worth ~$100 billion… He’d be top 20 richest people in the world,” stated Alex Finn, Founder/CEO of Henry Intelligent Machines PBC.

What FTX Victims Know and What They Do Not

Anthropic raised again in May 2026 at a $965 billion valuation. Four days later, it confidentially submitted a draft IPO registration to the SEC. Analysts at PitchBook and UCLA now value the forfeited stake between $2.6 billion and $5 billion.

The FTX estate made a comparable exit first. Its lawyers sold two-thirds of the company’s Anthropic position in March 2024. The price was $884 million, one of several bets they exited early.

That deal was public, with a court filing naming every buyer, from Jane Street to an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth unit. No such list exists for the Marshals sale.

“It’s a very opaque process… It’s completely at the discretion, by law, of the attorney general of the United States,” Duncan Levin, a white-collar defense attorney who teaches forfeiture at Harvard Law School, reportedly told Business Insider.

Nevertheless, seized money can still be recovered, as seen when Robinhood bought Sam Bankman-Fried’s confiscated shares from the government for $605.7 million in 2023.

Robinhood, $HOOD, to buy back Sam Bankman-Fried's stake in the company from the US government for $605.7 million.

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) September 1, 2023

The estate has since kept paying creditors down. No Anthropic entry had surfaced by the end of June 2026.

The Justice Department calls victim compensation a priority and the sale details confidential. For now, only the buyers know what they got.