When one tech founder hinted on X that he might sell his Anthropic shares, it was like throwing bread to seagulls. Within minutes, Jesse Leimgruber was fielding hundreds of offers, from wire-ready cash to offers of a VC partnership, all from investors scrambling to get a slice of one of AI's hottest companies.

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A gold-rush mentality for Anthropic stock has gripped Silicon Valley in recent weeks , as investors have been wowed by its torrid revenue growth and momentum around its AI-powered coding assistant, Claude Code. There was also a wave of support after Anthropic's dispute with the Pentagon.

"The demand is off the charts," he told me when I got him on the phone after assuring him I was not yet another buyer. "Every VC in Silicon Valley is racing to get Anthropic into their portfolio."

Some investors offered to wire millions of dollars in cash in 48 hours, while others sent him unsolicited screenshots of their bank accounts and proof-of-funds letters. Offers also flooded in from "very well-known growth equity funds," and requested to buy his stake at valuations exceeding $1 trillion for Anthropic.

"That's not something people usually send without an NDA, but people have to be so aggressive," he said. "It's kind of crazy."

Leimgruber started a CRM, or Customer Relationship Management system, to track the myriad of offers. He says the most unusual was a large VC firm that offered to make him a general partner in return for forking over his shares, but he quickly passed.

"They had no intention of making me a partner on their fund had it not been for the pledging of my Anthropic shares," he said. "That's how badly some of these people want in."

Tracking down shares in Anthropic has become a herculean task, with one banker offering up his $4.8 million Marin County estate in the hope of enticing early employees to part with a small portion of stock.

Since Anthropic has yet to go public, the vast majority of investors are forced to buy via secondary markets, where existing stock is sold by current or former employees or early investors. With the stock soaring, few are willing to part with their shares, and there have been a bevy of deals with high fees and byzantine ownership structures. (Anthropic declined to comment for this story. On its website, it warns against unauthorized stock sales and scams.)

"The problem is there are no sellers," said Glen Anderson, CEO of Rainmaker Securities, a merchant bank focused on private securities transactions. "There's an imbalance in the market."

That disparity makes those holding legitimate shares the bell of the ball.

"We receive daily offers from the ridiculous to the sublime," said Bradley Horowitz, a general partner at Wisdom Ventures, which was an early investor in Anthropic. "People are trying all kinds of shenanigans."

While Horowitz is unwilling to sell his shares, Leimgruber, who is the founder of AI hardware company OpenHome, is ready to take his chips off the table. He originally acquired his stake through the FTX bankruptcy in 2024, when Anthropic was valued at $18 billion, and says he is not an investing savant.

"I actually thought it was already overvalued then," he said. "No one could have predicted this."

With a 5,400% gain over two years, he sees limited upside from here and does not want to be concentrated in a single stock.

"I have a large portion of my assets in this one investment," he said. "Some diversification seems prudent."