The US government has sold Anthropic shares that were seized from the failed exchange FTX for $627 million, according to a report from WuBlockchain citing BeInCrypto. The figure that gives the sale its weight sits right beside it: those same shares carry a value of $3.94 billion as of October 28, 2026. The government cashed out at roughly one sixth of what the position would command today.
A $627 million exit at one sixth of today's price
The arithmetic carries the story. A $3.94 billion mark against a $627 million sale is about a 6.3x difference, or close to $3.3 billion in value that accrued after the shares left government hands. Both numbers come straight from the report, and the gap between them is simple subtraction rather than a forecast. The $3.94 billion is a present valuation, not cash in anyone's account, so the comparison measures paper value against a realized sale.
Private-company shares like Anthropic's do not trade on an open exchange, which means the current mark reflects where later funding rounds have priced the business rather than a daily quote. The direction, though, is not in dispute in the report: a stake sold for $627 million is now worth several times that.
The stake came out of FTX's wreckage
The shares were seized from FTX, which held a position in Anthropic before the exchange failed. That holding was pulled into the forfeiture and bankruptcy process that followed the collapse, and it has sat among the recovered assets tied to the case since then.
FTX remains the reference point for counterparty risk in crypto. Customers kept funds on a platform that turned out not to hold them the way they believed, and the unwinding has run for years. The episode is the standing argument for keeping money in self-custody rather than on a platform, where a company's failure cannot freeze or erase what you hold. The irony here runs the other way: in this instance it was the seized assets that multiplied, while the people who were made whole, if they were, saw their claims settled in dollars.
Forfeiture pushes seized assets toward quick cash
When the government takes control of assets through forfeiture, the normal path is conversion to cash, not a long hold. A forfeiture office is not a venture fund. It does not carry an illiquid stake in a private AI company for years on the chance that the valuation climbs, and it answers to rules built around realizing value and closing positions rather than maximizing it.
That logic explains a $627 million sale even when the asset later reprices far higher. Selling locks in a known dollar amount, removes the risk that a hot private valuation cools, and lets proceeds flow into the process that distributes them. Across large forfeiture cases the same pattern recurs: the asset is valued, sold, and the proceeds queued for distribution, regardless of where the price goes next. The cost of that approach only becomes legible after the fact, once the asset has run.
The gap reframes what recovery could have looked like
The roughly $3.3 billion the shares gained after the sale is the kind of number that reshapes the math around who the proceeds were meant to reach. Seized and estate assets in a case this large feed the pool available to the parties owed, and a position that grew more than sixfold would have changed the size of that pool had it been held to this point.
Whether holding was ever a real option under forfeiture rules is a separate question, and the report does not take it up. Treat the counterfactual as analysis, not a verdict: the sale may well have been the correct call under the mandate the sellers operate within, and the later run-up does not prove otherwise. A move of this size on a single line item is rare, and it is the sort of outcome that fuels second-guessing long after a sale is final. It also shows how much the dollar figure recovered from a collapse can swing on the single decision of when to sell.
Overview
The US government sold FTX-seized Anthropic shares for $627 million, a stake now valued at $3.94 billion per the WuBlockchain report, a gap of roughly 6.3x. The sale is consistent with how forfeited assets are usually handled, converted to cash rather than held, yet the later repricing makes the timing look costly with hindsight. For anyone tracking the FTX case, the takeaway is blunt: the amount recovered from a failure depends heavily on when assets are sold, and the one way to keep an exchange from deciding the fate of your funds is to not leave them sitting there.
