Anthropic is targeting an initial public offering in November at a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion—a blockbuster debut that would potentially eclipse the record set by SpaceX and could mint a new class of wealthy technology workers among the AI firm's more than 2,500 employees.

Yet the potential multimillion-dollar employee windfall appears to be raising concern among company leaders. According to a report by Axios, Anthropic has been asking job candidates during culture interviews how they would feel if the company someday abandoned its AI ambitions for safety reasons—and that decision caused its stock to fall to zero.

"I was honest and said no, I would not be happy if the stock went to 0," one candidate, who discussed the interview process on the anonymous workplace site Blind, said. "I would want to align doing the most good and remaining ethical while building a sustaining business."

The unusual question reflects concerns reportedly expressed by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei—who has an estimated net worth of $13.6 billion—about the way the company's enormous financial incentives could affect its ability to retain employees who are genuinely committed to its mission. Anthropic, which is organized as a public benefit corporation—a legal structure that obligates a for-profit company to pursue shareholder value alongside a stated public mission—has long sought to distinguish itself from competitors such as OpenAI through a broader focus on AI safety and the "long-term benefit of humanity."

"At the end of the day, the mission is what we're all here for," the company's values statement reads. "It gives us a shared purpose and allows us to act swiftly together, rather than being pulled in multiple directions by competing goals."

Anthropic is shelling out base salaries of $800K+ as the battle for tech talent rages on

Anthropic is simultaneously fighting to attract the world's top AI talent and grappling with what could happen if that talent becomes extraordinarily wealthy in the process.

The company is competing with the likes of Meta, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI for top researchers and engineers—and, as a result, offering compensation packages well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The competition is so fierce that Anthropic acknowledged in its S-1 filing, dated Oct. 26—the registration document a company files with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission before it can sell shares to the public—that hiring and retaining qualified employees has become exceptionally difficult, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the company is headquartered.

"Competition in our industry relating to hiring and retaining employees with appropriate qualifications and on competitive economic terms is exceptionally intense and has escalated significantly in recent periods," the company said in the filing.

Anthropic is currently dangling base salaries of $350,000 to $850,000 for staff software engineering roles, for example. And there is plenty more work to be done: the company currently has more than 600 open roles, including about 120 in sales, over 60 in AI research and engineering, and 50 in security.

The hiring process is so demanding that, in order to land an offer after such a highly competitive process, some candidates are reportedly spending more than $4,000 on private coaching to help them get hired.

"Spend a few thousand dollars, and now your salary goes up by $200,000—that calculus makes sense," Aline Lerner, founder of interview prep company Interviewing.io, told Bloomberg.

AI's wealth boom could create thousands of millionaires—but Amodei warns it could 'break society'

The potential wealth creation at Anthropic is part of a much bigger phenomenon unfolding across the AI industry, where soaring valuations are translating into life-changing payouts for employees.

That wealth effect flows from the IPO process itself: once a company lists, the private equity grants it used to attract employees become publicly tradable shares. Following SpaceX's $1.77 trillion IPO, thousands of current and former employees—from welders and coders to managers and executives—became millionaires as their company equity soared in value. Roughly 400 current and former SpaceX employees saw their stakes become worth more than $100 million.

As AI valuations continue to climb and employees cash in on equity grants, more people across the industry are expected to see similar wealth booms. Amodei, however, has warned that the economic benefits of AI could become concentrated among a relatively small group of people. As a result, he and Anthropic's other six cofounders—including his sister, Daniela Amodei—have committed to giving away 80% of their wealth.

"The thing to worry about is a level of wealth concentration that will break society," Amodei wrote in a letter published earlier this year.

Amodei has also called out fellow tech leaders who have grown increasingly skeptical of philanthropy, arguing that wealthy individuals have a responsibility to help address the inequality that AI could exacerbate.

"Wealthy individuals have an obligation to help solve this problem," Amodei wrote. "It is sad to me that many wealthy individuals (especially in the tech industry) have recently adopted a cynical and nihilistic attitude that philanthropy is inevitably fraudulent or useless."

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on August 25, 2026.