Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude model, is considering making 10b5-1 trading plans mandatory for all of its employees. If enacted, the policy would require every person at the company to pre-schedule any stock sales well in advance, effectively treating the entire workforce as potential insiders.
What are 10b5-1 plans and why do they matter
Think of a 10b5-1 plan like setting your stock sales on autopilot. You decide in advance when and how much you’ll sell, write it down, and then the trades execute automatically. The whole point is to create a paper trail proving you weren’t trading on inside information when the sale actually happens.
SEC Rule 10b5-1 has been around for decades, but it got a significant overhaul in 2022. The updated rules added mandatory cooling-off periods between when a plan is adopted and when the first trade can execute. They also require executives to certify in good faith that they don’t possess material non-public information when setting up their plans.
For a company like Anthropic, where employees may hold equity worth life-changing sums, these plans serve a dual purpose. They protect individual employees from accidental violations, and they protect the company from the reputational damage that comes with insider trading investigations.
The IPO backdrop
Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft registration statement, known as Form S-1, to the SEC around June 1, 2026. That’s the standard first move in the IPO playbook, and it positions the company for a potential public listing later this year.
The company’s Series H funding round reportedly valued it at $965 billion post-money, with run-rate revenues exceeding $47 billion.
Financial advisory firms working with Anthropic employees have already been recommending that workers voluntarily adopt 10b5-1 plans. The logic is straightforward: IPO processes involve extended blackout windows where insiders can’t trade, and having a pre-scheduled plan in place means employees don’t have to sit on their hands wondering when they’ll be able to access liquidity.
Advisors have noted that all Anthropic employees could potentially be treated as insiders subject to trading restrictions. In many pre-IPO companies, insider status is limited to executives and employees with direct access to financial data. Treating the entire workforce as potential insiders is a more conservative interpretation, but it reflects the reality that in a company building frontier AI systems, even an engineer’s knowledge about model capabilities could constitute material non-public information.