Last year, the federal government made a $627 million windfall from the sale of Anthropic stock seized from associates of cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.
Had it continued to hold on to the stake, its windfall could have been much greater.
Business Insider previously reported that the federal government last year sold Anthropic stock belonging to two executives at Bankmanfried’s now-defunct company, Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh.
Anthropic’s S-1 filing on Monday revealed how much the federal government received from the sale of its stock. The prospectus did not specifically mention Allison and Singer by name. The government allegedly sold 4,453,900 Anthropic Series B shares in October 2025, which “have been forfeited by the former holders in legal proceedings in which we were not involved.”
This figure is consistent with the total $50 million that Singh and Ellison purchased in Anthropic’s 2022 funding round at $11.2261 per share, which was later seized by the government.
Those stocks currently account for about a quarter of Anthropic. But given the company’s explosive growth, they’re still worth a fortune.
Anthropic has not announced the share price for its expected November initial public offering. At a valuation of $1.5 trillion, the shares are worth a total of about $3.94 billion. That would be six times the amount the government sold a year ago.
Federal Government’s Stake in Anthropic
How the federal government came to own a majority stake in Anthropic in the first place is a story involving a notorious fraudster and a complex criminal forfeiture process.
Bankman-Fried participated in Anthropic’s 2022 Series B funding round along with Singh and Ellison. Singer bought $40 million of Series B stock, and Allison bought $10 million.
Singer and Allison later pleaded guilty to crimes related to their work with Bankman-Fried and testified against him in a Manhattan federal criminal trial. The jury found Bankman-Fried guilty and the judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison. By April 2025, the federal government acquired Singer and Allison’s Anthropic shares.
Business Insider previously reported that the U.S. Marshals Service sold shares in Singer and Ellison rather than holding on to the hot Anthropic stock. The U.S. Marshals Service’s Integrated Asset Division is often responsible for distributing shares of private companies obtained through criminal forfeiture.
We now know that Anthropic purchased the stock from the Fed in October 2025 at $140.9676 per share, which was the same price Anthropic had set for its Series F-1 shares in a funding round a month earlier.
Anthropic resold the shares to nine investors for the same total price it paid to purchase the shares from the federal government, $627 million, so the company did not make a profit from the sale, according to the S-1 filing. It’s unclear which nine investors bought the stock originally owned by Singer and Allison. Representatives for the U.S. Marshals Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Allison and Singer’s Anthropic stock took a different path than Bankman-Fried’s own $500 million Series B stock. His shares eventually became part of FTX’s bankruptcy estate, and the company sold them to dozens of buyers in 2024 for a total of $1.3 billion.
Proceeds were used to repay creditors, including FTX customers and investors who were defrauded by the former crypto prodigy.
During the sentencing hearings for Singer and Ellison, Justice Department prosecutors told the federal judge overseeing the criminal case that they would use proceeds from the sale of Ellison and Singer’s Anthropic stock to compensate victims through a process called “reduction.” The federal government will either set up its own claims administration process or work with the FTX bankruptcy process to identify victims and provide them with forfeited funds.
A Justice Department spokesperson told Business Insider that the department “will use the forfeited funds toward reduced sentences,” as prosecutors said during Singer and Ellison’s sentencing hearings.
“One of the Department’s top priorities is to return forfeited funds to victims through asset forfeiture programs where permitted by law,” the spokesman said.
This story has been updated with a statement from the Justice Department.