Alex ZonneveldThe newest wealthy clients know exactly what a model can produce in a few seconds, and they’re pricing wealth management with that in mind.
Anthropic filed to go public on 26 October with plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, and press reports put its possible valuation somewhere between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion, with a listing expected in mid to late November. Its employees are about to hold a great deal of wealth, most of it in a single stock, and they’re already approaching wealth management much as a company approaches procurement, asking firms to pitch and to disclose their fees up front. They’re likely to pay well for the things a model can’t do, such as managing concentration, liquidity and oversight, and to pay very little for the things it can.
Wealth management, run like a tender
Before it filed, Anthropic asked wealth firms to pitch for its employees’ business and to set out their fees and services in advance. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, BNY, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo have all been in discussions, along with a number of smaller boutiques. That’s unusual, because in most liquidity events wealth firms find employees one at a time, at a conference or through a mutual friend, and the question of fees tends to come up late in the conversation.
SpaceX employees went further still. More than 1,000 current and former staff organised to negotiate with wealth managers as a group, and one group of about 100 reportedly secured an annual fee of under 0.5% from Choreo, an RIA, at a time when the industry norm on large relationships has sat at around 1% for years. Choreo is now talking to Anthropic and OpenAI staff as well, and it’s clear that these clients understand their bargaining power and intend to use it.
Why they’ll pay for less
Consider what a typical 1% fee has traditionally paid for: a financial plan, a model portfolio, tax projections, a quarterly review and a well-written letter. An Anthropic employee watches models produce that kind of work every day, and some of them build the systems that do it. When Altruist’s AI tax agent wiped billions off wealth manager valuations in February, the market reached a conclusion these clients had probably arrived at long before, which is that the plan is no longer the scarce part.
McKinsey described the shift as “planning is getting cheaper than supervision,” and this group of clients is likely to pay for supervision in the fullest sense of the word, meaning judgment, access, verification and someone who is accountable when it matters. What they’re unlikely to accept is paying a share of their net worth every year for documents they could generate themselves.
Their first problem is risk
The plan can wait, because the first problem for most newly public employees is that the bulk of their wealth now sits in a single company’s shares, which is about as concentrated a trading risk as anyone can carry. SpaceX shows how quickly that can turn: its shares listed at $135 this year, rose as high as $226 and were trading at around $127 within a month, so anyone holding most of their net worth in the stock watched more than 40% come off the peak in a few weeks.
There’s a structural question too, which tends to get less attention. When these employees start to diversify, they’ll need to know who will hold the assets, who will be able to trade them and who will be able to move them, and those should be three separate answers rather than one.
Then comes liquidity
Anthropic’s filing describes lock-up restrictions that are released in stages, including small partial releases during the first two months. Decisions about tax withholding on restricted stock units, trading windows and pre-arranged selling plans all have to be made early, and many of them are hard to undo, which is why tax is often described as the single largest risk for people going through a liquidity event like this one.
Once the lock-ups begin to ease, a second wave of decisions arrives, because selling down a single stock means putting the proceeds somewhere, and a good deal of this capital will be offered private credit, private equity and hedge fund strategies. This year offers a useful warning. Holders of Blue Owl’s technology lending fund asked to redeem around 40% of their shares in the first quarter and 39% in the third, and on each occasion the fund paid out 5%, with Blue Owl citing “AI-related disruption to software companies” as one of the causes. Private credit had lent more than $500 billion to software firms by the end of 2025, according to the Bank for International Settlements, which means an AI engineer diversifying out of an AI stock could easily end up in a credit fund whose loans depend on the very software companies that AI is disrupting. That might still turn out to be a sensible allocation, but it’s something they should understand before they sign, and the arithmetic of a gated fund is set out in Liquidity is a match, not a feature.
And access on their own terms
These clients have already shown how they want access to work: fees disclosed before anyone is chosen, firms competing to be selected, and groups of employees negotiating together rather than one at a time. It’s reasonable to expect that they’ll want the same clarity about whatever they end up holding, including the ability to see inside it, to trace every number back to its source and to decide for themselves who else is allowed to act on it.
The firms that win this business will be the ones that can answer questions about risk, liquidity and access with evidence rather than a pitch deck, because these are clients who can generate the plan themselves but can’t generate proof. We set out the full framework in Managing money well comes down to three things.
Where MakeBanc fits
MakeBanc is infrastructure for that kind of oversight. It lets capital owners allocate to independent strategy operators they already know while keeping family-office-style checks on every position. Your assets sit with an institutional custodian in a vault you sign for, and the manager can trade them but can never move them. Every number is labelled as self-reported, observed or verified, liquidity terms are shown before you allocate, and every cost is itemised, including anyone else who is paid.
MakeBanc takes no view on whether to buy, hold or sell any stock, Anthropic’s included, and doesn’t choose strategies for you. What it gives you is the visibility to make those decisions yourself.
Frequently asked questions
When is the Anthropic IPO? Anthropic filed its S-1 on 26 October 2026 to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT. No date has been set, although press reports point to mid to late November 2026, and the price range will be published in an amended filing.
What do newly wealthy tech employees need from wealth management? At first they usually need help with single-stock concentration, staged lock-up releases, tax withholding on RSUs and selling plans. When they begin to diversify, they need a clear view of the structure, exit terms, underlying holdings and fees of anything they allocate to.
Are wealth management fees falling? They are for newly wealthy groups who negotiate together. A group of about 100 SpaceX employees reportedly secured an annual fee of under 0.5% from Choreo, compared with an industry norm of around 1% on large relationships.
How did wealth firms compete for Anthropic employees? Anthropic asked wealth firms to pitch for its employees’ business and to disclose their fees and services in advance. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, BNY, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo were reported to be in discussions, along with several smaller boutiques.
Sources
- CNBC, Anthropic IPO: The big questions its S-1 leaves unanswered, 30 October 2026
- Commons, Anthropic’s IPO filing, in plain English
- WealthManagement.com, Wealth firms urge patience on Anthropic IPO, 30 October 2026
- The Wealth Advisor, Goldman, BofA and JPMorgan are already fighting over Anthropic’s new millionaires, 13 September 2026
- InvestmentNews, Choreo eyes OpenAI, Anthropic employee wealth after SpaceX haul, 10 July 2026
- McKinsey & Company, The signal in the sell-off, April 2026
- Alternative Credit Investor, Blue Owl private credit redemption requests fall again in Q3, 30 October 2026
- BIS Quarterly Review, Private credit’s software lending meets AI disruption, March 2026
MakeBanc is a technology platform that connects investors with independent asset managers. MakeBanc does not provide investment advice, custody services or banking services. Nothing in this article is a view on any security, including Anthropic shares, or an offer or invitation to allocate to any strategy. Details of the Anthropic offering come from its preliminary prospectus and press reports and may change.