Written by Dietrich Knuth
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. judge ruled on Thursday that bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX may sell its shares in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John Dorsey in Wilmington, Delaware approved FTX's proposal to sell shares after FTX reached a settlement in court with a group of FTX clients who opposed the sale.
FTX invested $500 million in Anthropic in 2021, and currently holds a 7.84 percent stake in the company, according to court documents. The company has requested permission to sell shares as part of its court-supervised efforts to liquidate its assets and repay customers who lost access to their accounts when the company collapsed in 2022.
“We're selling Anthropic stock, we're selling everything, and we're putting the money in the bank,” FTX attorney Andy Dietderich said at a court hearing Thursday.
FTX expects to sell the shares at a profit, and will retain the flexibility to sell its shares at the “optimal and most appropriate time,” according to court documents.
“Due to the growing interest in artificial intelligence and large language models, there has been significant appreciation in the value of Anthropic stock since the debtors acquired and invested in Anthropic in 2021,” FTX wrote in a Feb. 3 lawsuit.
FTX's 2021 investment initially gave it a 13.56% stake in Anthropic. FTX's stake was diluted by the company's subsequent fundraising, which included a $4 billion investment from Amazon.com.
Clients who opposed the sale argued that FTX did not actually own Anthropic shares, because they were purchased with funds embezzled from FTX client deposits. But they agreed Thursday to allow the sale to proceed, as long as they are allowed to argue later that FTX customers own any money made from a future sale.
FTX already intends to repay customers using proceeds from the sale, and has enough cash to repay any specific group of customers it can convince a court they own Anthropic shares, Diederich said. FTX currently has $6.4 billion in cash, Diederich said.
FTX expects to pay all clients in full, though it will calculate their reimbursement based on cryptocurrency prices as of November 2022, when FTX filed for bankruptcy amid a prolonged slump in the cryptocurrency market, rather than the current higher value of cryptocurrency assets.
FTX founder Sam Bankman Fried was convicted of stealing billions from customers on November 2, in one of the largest financial frauds on record. Bankman-Fried will be sentenced on March 28, and is expected to appeal his conviction.
(Reporting by Dietrich Knuth, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, William MacLean)
