How much does the CEO of a company preparing for a possible $2 trillion IPO actually take home? For Anthropic's Dario Amodei, the answer — disclosed in the company's IPO prospectus, which Reuters reviewed — is $18 million for 2025, a figure that lands him squarely in the middle ranks of major-technology-company chiefs. It is more than the chief executives of Alphabet and Amazon made last year, and less than the top executives at Oracle and Nvidia. An Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment on the figures.
The composition of the package matters more than the headline number. Amodei's pay leans heavily toward stock and options rather than salary, a structure familiar from nearly every founder-led tech company: the annual compensation is a rounding error next to the equity stake that an IPO will finally put a market price on. The prospectus notably omits the number founders care about most — their exact ownership stakes — which could be worth billions depending on final pricing. Equilar research director Courtney Yu told Reuters that $18 million "seems on the lower end for a company valued at $2 trillion," and noted that the picture will change once Amodei's full holdings become visible after the listing. With six other co-founders in the picture, she added, Amodei may end up with a smaller slice of the IPO's wealth creation than other big-tech CEOs captured from their listings.
The family math is close: Anthropic president Daniela Amodei, the CEO's sister, received $16.4 million in total 2025 compensation. Both siblings had their base salaries doubled this past July to $1.4 million — an increase that applies going forward, not to the 2025 totals. The board has also granted each of them restricted stock units this year, with payouts conditioned partly on staying at the company and partly on the IPO itself, an explicit tie between the founders' next payday and the listing's success. Chief financial officer Krishna Rao earned $720,250 in 2025; hired in 2024 with options on 1.4 million shares, he exercised options worth $385,285 last year.
The prospectus arrives as Anthropic prepares for a listing as early as this fall that could value the Claude developer at more than $2 trillion, per the filing seen by Reuters. The document has already surfaced other notable disclosures — including that roughly 47% of revenue flows through Amazon and Google, and the co-founders' pledge to give away 80% of their personal equity to charity — and its risk-factors section warns that advanced AI could pose catastrophic or existential risks. What the compensation data adds is the most personal data point yet: what the people building frontier AI are formally paid while they wait for the largest liquidity event in the sector's history.
The comparison set shows how strange CEO pay has become at the AI-adjacent top of the market. Oracle co-CEO Clayton Magouyrk led 2025 SEC filings at $627.5 million, while the lowest disclosed figure was the $54,080 SpaceX paid Elon Musk before its own listing — alongside a promise of super-voting shares if the company reaches a $7.5 trillion valuation and puts a million people on Mars. Alphabet's Sundar Pichai reported $10.9 million, including $8.8 million of personal security costs, though the SEC's "compensation actually paid" measure — which captures swings in unvested stock — put him at $213.9 million. Amazon's Andy Jassy reported $2.1 million. Per the AFL-CIO, average S&P 500 CEO pay rose 21% last year to $22.8 million, a figure that excludes Musk's $158 billion Tesla stock plan — meaning Amodei's $18 million actually sits slightly below the average of the index he is about to join.
The broader read: founder-CEOs rarely take large salaries because their equity does the work, as Equilar's Yu put it — they "can simply subsist on the wealth from the equity they already possess." What makes Anthropic's filing unusual is timing. The compensation bands of the most valuable private AI company are being laid out in public just months before its conversion into a public one, giving investors a preview of how the company pays the two people who will be answerable for a $2-trillion-plus market cap. Once the ownership table appears in the final prospectus, the $18 million will read as the prologue, not the story.
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