Reed Hastings’ donor-advised fund plans to buy up to $300M in Anthropic IPO shares

Reed Hastings is putting his charity money where his board seat is.

A donor-advised fund set up by the Netflix co-founder plans to buy up to $300 million in Anthropic Class A shares at the IPO price. That makes one of the biggest names in streaming a prospective anchor buyer in what could be one of the largest public offerings ever.

The details of the Hastings order

The fund intends to acquire as much as $300 million worth of Anthropic Class A stock. The purchase price is set as whatever the shares price at on IPO day.

Timing follows Anthropic’s S-1 registration with the SEC, filed in late October 2026. The company is targeting a mid-November IPO.

Hastings is not a newcomer to the cap table. He has served on Anthropic’s board since May 2025 and already holds approximately 9,410 Class A shares.

That existing stake is small next to the planned purchase. If the fund fills the full $300 million order, Hastings’ philanthropic arm would hold a position many times larger than his personal one.

Valuation estimates for Anthropic range from $1 trillion to $2 trillion, and proceeds are projected to reach tens of billions of dollars.

Those proceeds could be boosted further by secondary shares and concurrent private placements from major tech investors.

Why a donor-advised fund, and why Hastings

A donor-advised fund works a bit like a charitable savings account. A donor puts assets in, typically gets the tax deduction up front, and then recommends grants to charities over time.

Hastings has used this playbook before. His long-standing approach has relied on DAFs to move large blocks of equity into charitable hands, capturing immediate deductions without triggering capital gains taxes.

The most visible example came in early 2024. Hastings contributed over $1.1 billion in Netflix shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

That gift moved stock he already owned. The Anthropic plan runs in the other direction: charitable money buying new shares in a company he helps govern.

Anthropic, for its part, has built philanthropy into its corporate identity. The developer of the Claude AI models operates as a public benefit corporation, a legal structure that lets a company pursue a stated social mission alongside profits.

The company has committed 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund. It also runs an employee equity donation-matching program, with matches ranging from 1:1 to 3:1 depending on tenure.

Against that backdrop, a board member routing a nine-figure IPO order through a charitable vehicle fits neatly into the house culture.

What this means for the IPO and the AI wealth debate

For the offering, a committed order of up to $300 million is a signal of insider confidence. When a sitting director’s affiliated fund lines up to buy at the IPO price, it tells other buyers that at least one person with a view inside the boardroom likes the entry point.

That said, $300 million is a rounding error against proceeds projected in the tens of billions.

There is also the governance angle. A board member’s affiliated fund buying a large block of shares is the kind of arrangement that tends to draw questions about disclosure and conflicts, and investors will want to see how it is described in Anthropic’s offering documents.

Anthropic’s 5% public benefit commitment and donation matching appear designed to get ahead of scrutiny over how AI wealth gets distributed.

For now, the key items to watch are the final IPO price, how much of the $300 million order actually gets filled, and how the market values a public benefit corporation once its shares trade freely. A $1 trillion to $2 trillion valuation range leaves a lot of room for the market to disagree with the estimates.