Feds quietly sold seized Anthropic shares from SBF's co-conspirators now worth $5B

The federal government quietly sold the Anthropic shares it seized from Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh, two former FTX executives who pleaded guilty to fraud. Based on Anthropic's latest valuation of $965 billion (as announced in May), those combined stakes are now worth between $4.17 billion and $5.03 billion, according to UCLA professor Olav Sorenson. The sale, which took place last year, transferred the shares to existing Anthropic shareholders, but the proceeds' destination remains unclear.

Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, and Singh, an early FTX executive, each invested in Anthropic's 2022 Series B round - $10 million and $40 million respectively. After their convictions, a judge ordered the shares forfeited to the government, which took ownership in February and April 2025. The Justice Department then liquidated the positions, but unlike the bankruptcy sale of Bankman-Fried's own Anthropic stake - which raised $1.3 billion for FTX creditors in 2024 - this sale's proceeds are being handled through a separate remission process.

The valuation surge is staggering. Anthropic, now the most valuable private company in the world per Crunchbase, has seen its worth climb from roughly $965 billion to as high as $1.5 trillion on the secondary market. PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes estimates the combined Ellison-Singh stake could be worth $2.62 billion at current marks, and if Anthropic goes public at a $2 trillion valuation, the shares would fetch about $5.44 billion. For context, Bankman-Fried's own Anthropic holdings - purchased for $500 million - were liquidated in 2024 for $1.3 billion, more than double his cost, with the largest chunk going to an entity tied to the UAE sovereign wealth fund.

The forfeiture process itself is unusually opaque. Typically, when the feds seize shares of private companies, they hand them to the US Marshals Service Complex Assets Unit for liquidation. The unit tries to value the shares as any institutional purchaser would, said Michael Bachner, a white-collar criminal and securities litigation attorney. But the Justice Department has broad discretion over how to handle the proceeds. Duncan Levin, a white-collar defense attorney who teaches forfeiture at Harvard Law School, notes that the process is "completely at the discretion, by law, of the attorney general of the United States."

The money's path to victims is equally murky. Because the number of potential FTX victims could run into the millions, the judge overseeing Ellison and Singh's cases ruled that compensation would be handled through remission - a DOJ-administered process rather than traditional court-supervised restitution. Prosecutors said they would either set up a claims administration process or work with the FTX bankruptcy estate, which is already paying creditors in full with interest thanks to the appreciation of Bankman-Fried's assets. But the DOJ has not publicly disclosed how much it received from the Ellison-Singh sale or when victims might see any distribution.

For executives and boards, this case is a stark reminder that forfeited assets can appreciate dramatically after seizure. Singh's attorney, Andrew Goldstein, said at sentencing that Singh gave up his shares "because it was the right thing to do," even though he may have had a legitimate claim. Now, those shares are worth billions - and the government, not the victims, controls the timing and method of distribution. The strategic lesson: any criminal exposure involving equity in high-growth private companies carries outsized financial consequences, and the resolution may be far less transparent than a typical bankruptcy proceeding.

As Anthropic continues its march toward a potential IPO, the value of these forfeited stakes will only grow. For FTX victims, the wait continues - and for the DOJ, the pressure to deliver on its remission promise mounts. The quiet sale of Ellison and Singh's shares may have been a footnote in the FTX saga, but its financial impact is now measured in billions, and the precedent it sets for asset forfeiture in the venture capital world is anything but quiet.