Anthropic warns investors about secondary platforms that offer access to its shares

As investors scramble to snap up shares of artificial intelligence companies across the board, Anthropic this week He updated his website To warn investors that a large number of private and secondary investment platforms that provide access to shares in the AI ​​company are in fact not permitted to do so.

The company has named Open Doors Partners, Unicorns Exchange, Pachamama Capital, Lionheart Ventures, Hiive, Forge Global, Sidecar and Upmarket as companies that are not authorized to provide access to buy or sell their shares.

“Any sale or transfer of Anthropic stock, or any interest in Anthropic stock, made by these companies is void and will not be recognized in our books and records,” the company blog post said.

Reached for comment, Forge Global claimed it had been incorrectly listed. “We are working with Anthropic to remove Forge’s name from this alert,” the platform told TechCrunch. “Forge does not facilitate transactions in the stock of any private company without the express consent of the company.”

The update comes alongside an increase in the number of investment platforms offering shares of AI companies (and thus their growth) via secondary markets where existing shareholders sell their shares, “tokenized” securities, special purpose vehicles (SPVs), or their holdings on the secondary market.

Anthropic, as the saying goes Raising new financing worth $900 billionhe has Especially it was in demandwith some secondary market brokers telling TechCrunch last month that it is one of the “hardest” stocks to source.

Over the past year, some cryptocurrency companies, such as OKX crypto exchangehas spun investment products that sell exposure to artificial intelligence companies. These often take the form of pre-IPO perpetual futures contracts, which are derivative instruments that track the value of private companies in secondary markets but do not offer actual stock ownership.

SPACs differ from such derivative schemes in that they offer investors the opportunity to purchase shares of an entity that owns at least some stake in Anthropic. These shares can be from a formal investor, or acquired when the investor is forced to liquidate his holdings, as happened during… FTX Bankruptcy. In other cases, the claim of ownership rights may be entirely fraudulent.

Anthropic says its preferred and common stock are subject to transfer restrictions, meaning that any sale or transfer of stock not approved by its board of directors will be deemed invalid. According to Anthropic, any third-party platform (specifically SPACs and retail investment firms) that claims to sell its shares directly or using futures contracts is not authorized to do so.

“We do not permit special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to acquire Anthropic shares and any transfer of shares to an SPV is void under our transfer restrictions,” the company blog said. “Offers to invest in Anthropic’s past or future financing rounds through a special purpose vehicle are prohibited.”