When the US Marshals Service moved to liquidate Anthropic shares seized from FTX executives in 2025, the decision likely seemed straightforward — convert a volatile private tech asset into hard cash for creditors and the federal treasury. It was, in hindsight, one of the most expensive judgment calls the government has made in the entire crypto enforcement era. The stake in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company, could now be worth approximately $5 billion. The US government effectively left $4.7 billion on the table.
The mechanics of how FTX — and by extension its executives — came to hold a meaningful position in Anthropic speaks to the extraordinary, almost surreal financial web that Sam Bankman-Fried and his associates constructed before the exchange's November 2022 collapse. FTX and its affiliated entities were prolific venture investors, deploying customer funds across a sprawling portfolio of startups, many of them in the artificial intelligence and crypto infrastructure space. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI researchers including Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, was among the most consequential of those bets — even if those who made it had no legal right to the capital they used.
When federal authorities moved in and dismantled FTX's holdings, the Anthropic stake was among the most recognizable and valuable assets in the seized portfolio. The US Marshals Service, which handles asset forfeiture and liquidation for federal cases, took custody and ultimately sold the shares during 2025. At the time of sale, the proceeds were presumably a fraction of what the position would command today. The source reporting places the current value of that stake at roughly $5 billion — a figure that implies the government received somewhere in the vicinity of $300 million or less when it sold, making the opportunity cost an eye-watering $4.7 billion.
The critical question is whether the decision to sell early was avoidable — or whether federal asset management rules made it almost inevitable. The US Marshals Service operates under legal and bureaucratic constraints that are designed for tangible seized assets: real estate, vehicles, cash, and jewelry. Private equity stakes in high-growth artificial intelligence companies do not fit neatly into that framework. Holding an illiquid minority position in a private startup while waiting for a valuation inflection point requires the kind of patient capital management that government liquidation processes are structurally ill-equipped to provide. There are no mark-to-market pressures in private markets, no exchange to exit on, and no clear mandate for a federal law enforcement agency to function as a venture capital fund.
Still, the scale of the loss demands scrutiny. Anthropic's rise has been among the most dramatic in the artificial intelligence sector, with the company attracting enormous investment rounds from Amazon and Google as the AI arms race intensified through 2024 and into 2025. Anyone holding a position through that period would have seen extraordinary appreciation. The government's creditors — including FTX's defrauded customers, who have their own claim on recovered assets — had a direct financial interest in maximizing the value of the estate. A $5 billion holding versus a fraction of that is not an abstraction; it represents real money that could have flowed back to victims of one of the largest financial frauds in crypto history.
This episode also reopens a broader policy debate about how the United States handles seized digital-era assets. The FTX estate is not the first case where federal liquidation has been criticized for timing. The US government's repeated early sales of seized Bitcoin over the years — offloading coins at prices far below what they would later command — drew consistent criticism from asset recovery specialists and crypto advocates alike. Each time, the defense was procedural necessity. Each time, the opportunity cost became a headline when prices moved. The Anthropic situation follows the same pattern but at a scale that makes previous Bitcoin sales look modest by comparison.
A more sophisticated federal framework for managing complex seized assets — one that allows for structured hold periods, professional asset management, or even staged liquidation tied to valuation milestones — would serve both justice and the public interest far better than the current blunt instrument approach. The Marshals Service is not staffed or mandated to make venture portfolio decisions, and expecting them to do so correctly is an institutional mismatch that Congress and the Department of Justice have so far declined to address seriously. The FTX estate, with its sprawling and unusual asset mix, was always going to stress-test that gap. It has now done so at a cost of $4.7 billion.
For the crypto and digital asset industry, the takeaway is both ironic and instructive. The assets that flowed out of FTX's fraudulent operation — built on misappropriated customer funds — turned out to include one of the most valuable private technology positions of the decade. The government recovered it, and then, through the ordinary mechanics of institutional liquidation, gave most of its value back to the market rather than to the victims it was trying to protect.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Bitcoin News.