The Gravity of Control: Anthropic Borrows from the Crypto Playbook

I do not chase the candle; I study the gravity. On August 19, The Information reported that Anthropic is preparing a class of stock with enhanced voting rights for CEO Dario Amodei and other co-founders. This is the first time the AI company's leadership will hold super voting rights. The move is designed to resist pressure from external shareholders, given that the co-founders hold a relatively low percentage of equity. Alongside this, Anthropic plans to retain its existing non-shareholder trustee system and use special class shares to elect a majority of board members. The goal: insulate the founding team from external influence. At first glance, this is a corporate governance story—a classic Silicon Valley power play. But look closer. The structure mimics the very mechanisms that crypto projects have used for years to concentrate control under the guise of decentralization. The non-shareholder trustee system? That is a multi-sig admin board. The special class shares? That is a governance token with unequal voting power. The underlying logic is identical: those who write the rules retain the ability to change them. History does not repeat, but it rhymes in code. And here, the code is legal, not smart contract. Yet the implications for blockchain governance are profound. We are watching a traditional AI company adopt a model that crypto proponents have long criticized—centralized control dressed in procedural complexity. The irony is thick enough to cut with a keystroke. Let me dissect the numbers. If the co-founders collectively hold less than 10% of Anthropic's equity, but their new class of shares grants them 50%+ voting power, that is a 5x multiplier on influence. This is not a bug; it is a feature. It mirrors the multi-sig admin keys in many DAOs, where a small group of signers can override any community vote. Based on my audit experience in 2017, I saw this exact pattern in projects like DeFinity—where the team held a negligible token supply but controlled the upgrade contract. The result? A 90% loss of user funds when they exploited their own logic. The mechanism is the same, only the wrapper differs. In the crypto world, we preach that code is law. But the reality is that smart contract upgrade rights always sit with a few multi-sig admins. Anthropic is now formalizing this in the corporate structure. The non-shareholder trustee system acts as a fallback—a parallel governance layer that can override even shareholder votes. This is the equivalent of a DAO having a foundation with veto power. It is a compliance shield, not a governance innovation. Liquidity is a mirror, not a foundation. The capital flowing into Anthropic from investors like Google and Salesforce is not a vote of confidence in the founding team's vision; it is a bet on the technology. But the moment those investors realize that their voting power is neutered, the liquidity will reflect the true power imbalance. The same happens in crypto: when a team retains multi-sig control, the market eventually prices in the risk of a rug or a governance capture. The mirror does not lie. Now, the contrarian angle. Some will argue that this is necessary for long-term vision. Founders need protection from short-term shareholder pressure. In crypto, this argument is used to justify foundation reserves and multi-sig admin keys. But I have seen where this leads. In 2022, after the FTX collapse, I retreated from active trading to study zero-knowledge proofs and modular architectures. I spent 18 months analyzing Celestia's data availability layer. What I learned is that true decentralization requires the removal of administrative privilege—not its concentration under a different name. Anthropic's move is not a solution; it is a symptom of a deeper trust deficit. Certainty is the enemy of the ledger. The attempt to secure control via legal structures is fragile. A shareholder vote can be challenged. A trustee can be sued. But a smart contract execution is deterministic. Yet in both cases, the underlying power dynamic is the same. The algorithm does not care about your conviction. It only executes the rules as written. And when the rules are written by a few, they will always serve the few. What does this mean for the convergence of AI and crypto? We are seeing a new hybrid governance model emerge—one that blends corporate law with blockchain mechanisms. Anthropic is a trailblazer in this space, but not in the way its founders intend. They are exposing the fundamental tension: decentralization is not a technology; it is a redistribution of power. And no one gives up power willingly. In my role as a Digital Asset Fund Manager, I allocate capital based on governance structure first, tokenomics second. I look for projects where the upgrade rights are time-locked, where the admin keys are under community oversight, where the code is truly law. Anthropic's structure would fail my test. It is a honeypot dressed in sophistication. Takeaway: The next bull market will not be driven by hype. It will be driven by the discovery that governance is the only fundamental. Anthropic's super voting rights are a canary in the coal mine. The question is not whether they will succeed, but whether the market will reward the illusion of control or the reality of trust. I am betting on the latter. The algorithm does not care about your conviction. But it does care about the constraints you cannot escape.