Anthropic's adviser list will be won on fees, not logos

Anthropic has asked the wealth industry to put pricing and services on paper, and the request has drawn Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, BNY Mellon's wealth unit, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo into discussions as the AI developer compiles a list of advisers for employees facing IPO windfalls, AdvisorHub reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Smaller boutiques and advisory firms answered the same request for information, which Anthropic opened in recent weeks; representatives for the banks and the company declined to comment, per that report.

The questions were the same for everyone—pitch the wealth-management business, disclose fees, describe services and operations—and it is not often that a ten-advisor independent firm gets the same page and the same deadline as a bulge-bracket private bank in a referral contest. The firms that treat the response as planning work rather than a beauty contest will have the better document.

Brandon Smith of Laird Norton Wetherby, which submitted information to Anthropic and had already been talking with several of its employees, called the coming wealth creation 'very reasonable' to expect. 'There has been such a rapid rise in AI in a short period of time, and even though they received equity only two years ago, the likely outcome is a large dollar figure,' he told AdvisorHub. 'It is equivalent to a lottery ticket.' Anthropic is expected to raise as much as or more than SpaceX's $86.2 billion debut when it reaches the market in coming weeks, and for the adviser pitching that account, the work opens with one stock and one tax year rather than a portfolio.

The SpaceX listing is the better precedent to study: more than 1,000 current and former employees of that company organized ahead of the debut to negotiate with wealth managers over pricing and access to sophisticated tax-saving products. A cohort that arrives with a spreadsheet and a group discount in mind will not be won by a logo, and the pitch that beats it names the fee, shows the tax work, and says who performs it.

Laird Norton's position is the transferable lesson: it was in conversations with those employees before the request for information went out, which is where windfall relationships are actually won—during the years of accumulating equity, not the week the shares become liquid. The banks are staffing for the same fight, with the same report noting that Teresa Radzinski joined Citi after nearly three decades at Bank of America, another cross-firm move of the kind that has repriced private-bank benches all year, as this publication has argued. Watch whether Anthropic's employees borrow the SpaceX playbook and negotiate as a bloc. If they do, expect the winning pitch to be a fee schedule, a tax plan, and the name of the person doing the work.