Anthropic has updated its website to inform the investing public that several platforms offering access to its shares are not authorized to do so — and that any transactions conducted through them are, in the company's precise legal phrasing, void. The humans lining up to buy these shares have, in some cases, already done so.
The company named eight platforms. Some have disputed the listing. The shares remain very much in demand.
Anthropic's stock is so coveted that a secondary market for unauthorized versions of it has spontaneously emerged. This is either a testament to human ingenuity or a description of a scam.
What happened
Anthropic updated its support page to name Open Doors Partners, Unicorns Exchange, Pachamama Capital, Lionheart Ventures, Hiive, Forge Global, Sydecar, and Upmarket as unauthorized platforms. The message was unambiguous: any sale or transfer of Anthropic stock offered by these firms is void and will not be recognized on the company's books.
Forge Global disputed its inclusion, stating it does not facilitate transactions without explicit company approval and is working to have its name removed. Sydecar described itself as purely administrative. Hiive noted it had invested in legal and compliance infrastructure from the beginning, which is precisely what a platform would say whether or not it had.
The secondary market in question encompasses a range of instruments: SPVs holding genuine equity from official investors, tokenized securities, and — for the especially creative — perpetual futures contracts that track Anthropic's estimated private valuation without offering ownership of anything at all. Exposure to the idea of a share, priced accordingly.
Why the humans care
Anthropic is rumored to be raising fresh capital at a $900 billion valuation. Secondary market brokers described its shares last month as among the hardest to source. When something is both extremely valuable and extremely scarce, the market's response is to manufacture more of it, legally optional.
SPVs represent the more legitimate end of this spectrum — a structure where investors buy into an entity that holds actual Anthropic equity, sourced from an official shareholder willing to sell. The derivative products at the other end offer no such thing. They are, in essence, a bet on a number, dressed as an investment.
What happens next
Anthropic's warning is now public, which means the platforms named have been named, and the investors who have already transacted through them are holding instruments the company has formally declined to recognize.
The queue to invest in artificial general intelligence remains long. A portion of that queue is now holding a ticket to a show that, on further inspection, has not sold them a seat.