On Oct. 14, Anthropic announced the opening of its first Singapore office and said \u201ccofounder Ben Mann\u201d had signed an agreement with the Singapore Ministry of Digital Development and Information.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Almost two weeks later, Mann received a different distinction in Anthropic\u2019s 335-page IPO filing. In a footnote on Page 248, the company noted that while Mann is \u201coften referred to as a cofounder\u201d he is \u201cnot a member of the Founder LLC nor a Continuing Founder.\u201d Hence, he would not be part of the cohort of seven founders who would jointly control more than 50.1% of shareholder voting power. Mann\u2019s percentage of shares is unknown.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for Anthropic confirmed Monday that there have been no changes to Mann\u2019s role, and \u201cit\u2019s still fair to refer to him as a cofounder.\u201d Mann\u2019s LinkedIn page lists him as such.<\/p>\n
So why is Mann, who everyone agrees is a founder, seemingly shut out?<\/p>\n
Mann, 37, who lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children, co-leads Anthropic Labs, (opens in new tab)<\/a> the company\u2019s experimental arm, alongside Mike Krieger of Instagram. Mann helped develop GPT-3 at OpenAI, left in 2021, decamping with seven others who went on to found Anthropic. He left OpenAI because \u201csafety wasn\u2019t the top priority there,\u201d he said in a 2025 podcast interview. In June 2021, he wrote on the \u201clife updates\u201d section of his substack: \u201cAnnounced our new company, Anthropic (opens in new tab)<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But despite his cofounder title, which is also displayed on his personal site and in various Anthropic materials, the company has been inconsistent in describing Mann\u2019s role.\u00a0<\/p>\n He\u2019s been repeatedly cut from the company\u2019s founding story. At a 2024 Bloomberg summit, CEO Dario Amodei stated (opens in new tab)<\/a>, \u201cWe have seven cofounders (opens in new tab)<\/a>.\u201d That December, Anthropic published a YouTube video titled \u201cA conversation with our cofounders,\u201d which included seven.<\/p>\n In Silicon Valley, \u201ccofounder\u201d is much more than a vanity title.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Founder\u2019 in colloquial terms means somebody who helps get the startup going. But it is not a legal term,\u201d said Ann Lipton (opens in new tab)<\/a>, a professor at University of Colorado Law School who has worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission. The IPO footnote makes clear what Mann\u2019s continued rights are, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s not going to have continuing governance rights in the firm. He may continue to have economic rights, but we don\u2019t know what they are,\u201d she said, noting that Mann is not legally disputing this state of affairs, as that would have had to be disclosed. \u201cIt\u2019s possible there was no disagreement; he just didn\u2019t want to be involved with the public entity. That\u2019s a lot of work. There are 20 zillion possible explanations that are completely benign.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Mann is absent from Anthropic\u2019s leadership page, which was created in August. But in 2025, the company identified him as a cofounder at its Tokyo Builder Summit (opens in new tab)<\/a>. Yet in a June 2026 (opens in new tab)<\/a> interview, Amodei again stated that the company started with seven. All the while, Mann has continued giving interviews as a cofounder, including on \u201cLenny\u2019s Podcast<\/a>\u201d in 2025, telling the host, \u201cIf we do our jobs, we will have safe aligned superintelligence.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Mann did not return a request for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n Anthropic would have known the contents of its IPO filing on Oct. 14 yet was still publicly calling Mann a cofounder in the Singapore press release. \u201cIf they already knew that they were defining a specific group of people as founders in this document to the point where they have to disclaim that this guy is associated with it, and they were very recently still referring to him as a cofounder publicly \u2026 [that] raises a question whether a last-minute change was made,\u201d said Lipton.<\/p>\n Benjamin Mann has been an integral part of Anthropic since its founding in January 2021 and, given his role in establishing Anthropic, is often referred to as a co-founder. However, Mr. Mann is not a member of the Founder LLC nor a Continuing Founder upon the completion of this offering, and accordingly will not participate in determining how our Class F common stock is voted. Except as set forth in this paragraph, references to our \u201cco-founders\u201d elsewhere in this prospectus do not include Mr. Mann. \u2014 Anthropic\u2019s S-1 filing, Footnote 13<\/p>\n The S-1 filing is unusual even by Silicon Valley standards. \u201cThis is just an extremely complex structure,\u201d said Lipton, noting that it gives significant governance power to employees who don\u2019t have many\u00a0shares. The stated purpose is to make sure AI isn\u2019t misused. <\/p>\n \u201cThere isn\u2019t a lot of precedent for this.\u201d Still, she added, \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything unusual or weird about somebody who was involved in a startup phase not wanting to take a public-facing governance role once they go public.\u201d<\/p>\n The discrepancy might have been intentional. \u201cIt could very well be because they knew \u2026 that he wasn\u2019t going to have a governance role, and they knew they were calling a particular group of people \u2018founders\u2019 for the purpose of governance, which is a little bit different than the actual people who actually started the company,\u201d said Lipton.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThey clearly thought that there\u2019s going to be confusion. You usually are going to be very careful in an IPO context,\u201d she added.\u00a0 \u201cI would not expect them to continue to refer to him as cofounder.\u201d<\/p>\n Lipton sees the footnote as indicating that Mann \u201cwas a founder in the factual colloquial sense. But now that they have defined the term to have a legal meaning for the purpose of this document they don\u2019t want to confuse people,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t necessarily think it means anything nefarious, but it could. I mean, he was there, and now he\u2019s not. We just don\u2019t know why.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Oct. 14, Anthropic announced the opening of its first Singapore office and said \u201ccofounder Ben Mann\u201d had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":509183,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2007,19534,36209,101,103,102,104,106,105,8170,9560],"class_list":["post-509182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-moguls","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-startups","tag-wealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/509183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}