The United States government has quietly sold equity stakes in artificial intelligence company Anthropic that were forfeited by two former Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) lieutenants, Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh, as part of their criminal cooperation deals.
The transactions, carried out during 2025 by the US Marshals Service, turned a $50 million crypto-era personal investment into what could become one of the most lucrative federal asset forfeitures in recent memory, with the same shares now potentially worth roughly $2.6 billion to $5 billion at Anthropic’s current private-market valuation.
Details of the sales were reported this week by Business Insider. According to the report, Ellison, the former chief executive of Alameda Research, formally surrendered her Anthropic holdings in February 2025, while Singh, a former co-lead engineer at FTX, followed in April 2025. Neither the identity of the buyers nor the final sale price has been made public.
The Forfeiture Timeline
Both executives originally acquired their Anthropic stakes during the AI company’s 2022 Series B funding round. Ellison contributed roughly $10 million, and Singh committed around $40 million, per the Business Insider account. The holdings were later forfeited to the government under Title 21 U.S.C. § 853, the federal statute that governs criminal asset forfeiture, as part of the sentencing and plea processes overseen by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Ellison pleaded guilty in December 2022 to seven counts, including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, and became the central cooperator at Sam Bankman-Fried’s 2023 trial. She was sentenced in September 2024 to two years in prison and ordered to forfeit approximately $11 billion. Singh, who pleaded guilty in February 2023, reportedly cooperated extensively and was ultimately spared prison time.
The US Marshals Service, the federal agency responsible for administering and disposing of property seized in criminal cases, opted to sell the shares to existing Anthropic investors rather than pursue a broader auction. The approach reflects the illiquid nature of private-company equity and the closed structure of Anthropic’s shareholder register.
What the Sale Could Be Worth
Because the transactions were private and the price was not disclosed, estimates of the government’s realised proceeds vary. Analyst figures cited by Business Insider place the net anywhere between about $250 million and $1.1 billion, depending on the private-market valuation Anthropic commanded during the sale window.
Anthropic’s valuation has since climbed sharply, giving the story much of its magnitude. Measured against the AI company’s more recent private-market pricing, the combined value of the Ellison and Singh stakes today would sit somewhere between roughly $2.6 billion and $5 billion, based on the range. In practical terms, the government’s actual proceeds are likely to have been meaningfully lower than that theoretical peak, because the sales took place before the highest valuation prints of 2026.
FTX Victims Still Waiting for Proceeds
The disposition of the money has quickly emerged as a point of contention. As of late June 2026, none of the proceeds from the Marshals Service sales had reached the FTX bankruptcy estate, which is continuing to process distributions to customers who lost access to their funds when the exchange failed in November 2022.
Sunil Kavuri, a representative of the largest FTX creditor group, has publicly argued that the proceeds should be routed to victim compensation, on the basis that the original investments were made using resources tied to FTX and Alameda Research. Forfeited-asset proceeds, however, move through a separate legal pipeline from bankruptcy distributions, and coordination between the Department of Justice and the bankruptcy court in Delaware has historically been slow.
The FTX estate itself is preparing a further round of creditor payments, with public statements from Kavuri indicating an approximately $9.6 billion distribution of reconciled claims scheduled for March 31, 2026. That is expected to take cumulative estate payouts well beyond the $16 billion mark, though many customers continue to argue that dollar-denominated repayments valued at petition-date prices leave them meaningfully short in real crypto terms.
Distinct From the FTX Estate’s Own Anthropic Sale
The forfeited Ellison and Singh stakes are entirely separate from the far larger Anthropic position that FTX itself once held. Under Bankman-Fried, FTX invested $500 million in Anthropic in 2021, taking what was initially a 13.56% equity interest that later stood at 7.84%.
The bankruptcy estate liquidated that stake in two 2024 tranches. In March 2024, it sold approximately two-thirds of its position for about $884 million to a consortium led by ATIC Third International Investment Company, an affiliate of Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala sovereign wealth fund, with other buyers including Jane Street Global Trading, funds affiliated with Fidelity Investments and the Ford Foundation.
In June 2024, the estate sold its remaining 15 million shares at $30 apiece, netting more than $450 million, with venture firm G Squared the largest single buyer. The two rounds together generated roughly $1.3 billion for the estate.
Anthropic’s Ascent as an AI Heavyweight
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers Dario and Daniela Amodei and has since grown into one of the highest-valued private artificial intelligence companies in the world, backed by Google, Amazon and Salesforce. Its Claude family of large language models competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini across consumer, enterprise and developer markets.
Rapid appreciation in the firm’s private valuation is the reason a set of comparatively modest 2022 personal investments by two now-convicted crypto executives has become one of the more consequential financial threads remaining in the FTX saga.
The company’s ascent has also renewed attention on how much value was concentrated inside the FTX portfolio at the point of collapse, an issue that has resurfaced repeatedly across the bankruptcy process.
What Comes Next
Whether any portion of the Anthropic sale proceeds ultimately reaches FTX customers, or is retained by the federal government under standard forfeiture rules, depends on continuing coordination between the Justice Department, the US Marshals Service and the bankruptcy court in Delaware.
On the civil side, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in December 2025 finalised consent judgments against Ellison, Singh and former FTX chief technology officer Gary Wang, imposing a ten-year officer-and-director bar on Ellison and eight-year bars on Wang and Singh, along with permanent injunctions against future securities law violations.
Neither the US Marshals Service nor Anthropic has publicly commented on the terms or timing of the 2025 share sales. For FTX customers, victim advocates and observers of one of the largest fraud cases in the crypto industry, the question of where the money finally lands is likely to shape the last major chapter of the estate’s cleanup.
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