Anthropic has publicly disavowed eight investment platforms that have been marketing access to its shares, telling investors that any stock sold through those venues will not be recognized. In a blog post updated this week, the company named Open Doors Partners, Unicorns Exchange, Pachamama Capital, Lionheart Ventures, Hiive, Forge Global, Sydecar and Upmarket as unauthorized to facilitate buying or selling of its equity. The notice arrives as Anthropic is reportedly raising fresh funding at a $900 billion valuation, a price that has turned its private stock into one of the most sought-after assets in tech.
"Any sale or transfer of Anthropic stock, or any interest in Anthropic stock, offered by these firms is void and will not be recognized on our books and records," the company wrote. That language is sweeping: it covers direct share sales, forward contracts, and special purpose vehicles that claim to hold exposure to Anthropic equity.
The company drew a particularly hard line on SPVs, the structure most commonly used by retail-facing platforms to slice up private-company stakes. "We do not permit special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to acquire Anthropic stock and any transfer of shares to an SPV are void under our transfer restrictions," the post reads. "Offers to invest in Anthropic's past or future financing rounds through an SPV are prohibited."
Key facts
- 01Anthropic named eight platforms — Open Doors Partners, Unicorns Exchange, Pachamama Capital, Lionheart Ventures, Hiive, Forge Global, Sydecar and Upmarket — as unauthorized to trade its shares.
- 02The warning lands as Anthropic is reportedly raising fresh capital at a $900 billion valuation.
- 03Anthropic said SPV-based purchases of its stock are prohibited and any such transfer is void under its restrictions.
- 04Forge Global said it was included erroneously and is working with Anthropic to be removed from the alert.
- 05Secondary brokers told reporters last month that Anthropic shares are among the hardest private stocks to source.
Forge Global pushed back on its inclusion. "We are working with Anthropic to remove Forge's name from this alert," the platform said. "Forge does not facilitate transactions in any private company's shares without the explicit approval of the company." Forge's position is that it does not intermediate trades a company hasn't blessed — making the listing, in its view, a mistake rather than a substantive dispute. Anthropic has not publicly responded to Forge's request.
“Any sale or transfer of Anthropic stock, or any interest in Anthropic stock, offered by these firms is void and will not be recognized on our books and records.”— Jaeden Schafer
The other named platforms had not, as of publication, issued public responses to the disavowal. Anthropic's notice does not allege fraud against any specific firm; it asserts that none of the eight have authorization to move its stock and that any resulting transfers are invalid under the terms attached to both its preferred and common shares.
Demand for Anthropic exposure has been climbing in lockstep with its valuation. Secondary brokers said last month the company's stock is among the hardest private names to source, a function of tight transfer restrictions and a cap table dominated by strategic investors such as Google and Amazon. Anthropic's reported $900 billion mark would make it one of the most valuable private companies in the world, just as Google committed up to $40 billion in compute and Amazon expanded its pact to as much as 5 gigawatts and $25 billion in additional investment — deals AI Chat Daily covered in recent weeks.
Over the past year, the workaround economy around AI equity has gotten creative. Crypto exchange OKX and others have launched pre-IPO perpetual futures — derivative contracts that track private-company valuations on secondary markets without conveying any actual share ownership. Those products sit outside Anthropic's transfer-restriction regime because they never touch the underlying stock, but they also offer no claim on the company.
SPVs are the messier category. A legitimate SPV might hold equity originally acquired by an approved investor; a less legitimate one might be selling claims tied to stock that surfaced through forced liquidations, such as those that followed the bankruptcy of FTX. In the worst cases, the underlying equity claim is fabricated entirely. Anthropic's blanket position — that any SPV-mediated transfer of its shares is void — collapses the distinction by treating the structure itself as out of bounds.
The enforcement question is where the notice gets interesting. Anthropic can refuse to update its cap table and refuse to recognize any buyer who didn't go through an approved channel, which is what the post says it will do. What it can't easily stop is the marketing of products whose payoff merely references its valuation. Perpetual futures and similar derivatives will likely keep trading regardless of the alert, which targets the share-ownership end of the market rather than the synthetic-exposure end.
For investors, the practical read is straightforward: a contract that promises Anthropic shares from a platform on the named list is worth whatever the counterparty's reputation is worth, because Anthropic has said it won't honor the transfer. The named platforms now have an incentive to either secure explicit company approval, as Forge says it always requires, or stop marketing the product.
Anthropic's move reflects a broader tension in the AI funding cycle. Valuations of the top model labs have outrun the supply of accessible shares, creating a gray market in synthetic and SPV-wrapped exposure that the labs themselves did not authorize. By naming names rather than issuing a generic warning, Anthropic is signaling it intends to police that gray market actively — and putting platforms on notice that they need company sign-off, not just willing sellers, to credibly offer its stock.
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