The AI Lab Control Tracker: Equity vs. Voting Power at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google and xAI

Control at the five companies building frontier AI does not follow the money. Larry Page and Sergey Brin together cast 52.7 percent of the votes at Alphabet, Google's parent, on about 11 percent of its voting-class shares 1. Elon Musk holds roughly 85.1 percent of the voting power at SpaceX, which has owned xAI outright since February 2, 2026 2. And since April 14 2026, a majority of Anthropic's board has been elected by a trust built to hold no financial stake in the company, an outcome the public IPO filing filed in September now locks in and tops with a second control layer: a 50.1 percent voting bloc reserved for seven co-founders 34.

This tracker measures that gap, holder by holder. Every figure links to its document: a charter, an SEC filing, or a company's own governance page where one exists, and a named, dated report where control figures are only published that way. The metric is the control premium, a holder's share of the votes divided by that holder's share of the equity. At par it equals one. Across these five companies it runs from about two up to values no ratio can express.

Inside Alphabet's 4.7-to-one control premium

Alphabet's 2026 proxy prints the raw material: Class A common stock carries one vote, Class B carries ten, Class C carries none, and the classes vote together as one 1. Larry Page beneficially owns 389,051,160 Class B shares, worth 27.4 percent of total voting power. His economic footprint, those shares against the 6,659,444,154 Class A and B shares outstanding at the April 6, 2026 record date, works out to 5.8 percent. Divide 27.4 by 5.8 and each unit of Page's ownership carries about 4.7 votes. Sergey Brin lands in the same place, 25.3 percent of votes on 5.4 percent of shares 1. The lock runs deeper than the founders: Alphabet's executives and directors as a group hold 92.2 percent of Class B, worth 54.3 percent of total voting power. For scale, BlackRock's 356,934,964 Class A shares make it one of Alphabet's largest owners at 6.1 percent of that class, worth 2.5 percent of the votes; Page owns about 9 percent more shares than BlackRock and wields roughly eleven times its voting power 1.

Meta runs the same math at a near-identical multiplier, about 4.5. Mark Zuckerberg holds 60.8 percent of Meta's total voting power on 99.8 percent of its ten-vote Class B stock (639,347 Class A and 341,823,978 Class B shares beneficial as of April 1, 2026), per the company's 2026 proxy 5. His economics, 13.5 percent computed from the proxy's own outstanding counts (2,196,045,588 Class A and 342,377,716 Class B), put the control premium at about 4.5: 60.8 over 13.5 5. Morningstar's analysis of the May 2024 shareholder meeting had him at 61 percent, holding 99.7 percent of the ten-vote Class B stock, a meeting-vote basis rather than outstanding shares 6. The lock holds because Class B converts to one-vote Class A on sale or transfer, with limited exceptions for estate planning and charitable donations 7.

Musk is the founder outlier because his money is real: an estimated 42 percent of SpaceX's equity against roughly 85.1 percent of its votes, a premium of about two 82. The SpaceX S-1, which defines the xAI parent as X.AI Holdings LLC, is what puts xAI's ownership on the public record at all 9.

At OpenAI and Anthropic, control rides on rights, not share counts

OpenAI completed its restructuring on October 28, 2025: the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC is controlled by the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation, which holds conventional equity in the group 10. Reported figures put the Foundation at 26 percent of the company, a share NBC values at about 130 billion dollars, and Microsoft at 27 percent, against OpenAI's reported 500 billion dollar valuation in early October 10. Microsoft's stake carries no control rights beyond ordinary shares, as reported, and Microsoft and other investors do not have seats on OpenAI's boards 10. Those percentages predate 2026's bigger checks: OpenAI closed a round on March 31, 2026 with 122 billion dollars in committed capital at an 852 billion dollar post-money valuation, and SoftBank's final installment, due October 1, 2026, brings its cumulative investment to 64.6 billion dollars for a roughly 13 percent stake, one more giant owner with no reported control rights 11. The listing those rounds were bridging toward has slipped: OpenAI has delayed its IPO, a decision Sam Altman attributed to safety risks, telling Bloomberg TV on September 29 he did not want to put additional pressure on the company right now, and the company is in preliminary talks to raise at least 30 billion dollars at a pre-money valuation of about 1.4 trillion 11. The Foundation's premium cannot be computed from public numbers, because its control is stated as a right, not a percentage.

Anthropic, a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation chartered around "the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity" 12, went further. It created Class T stock, held exclusively by the Long-Term Benefit Trust, which elects and removes a share of the board that phases in on time and funding milestones and was designed to reach a majority within four years, by September 2027; Series C and later investors elect one seat 12. The deadline arrived more than a year early: with the appointment of Novartis chief executive Vas Narasimhan on April 14, 2026, directors chosen by the trust became a majority of the board, a threshold the company itself confirmed 3. The trust is designed as a body of five financially disinterested trustees 12; four currently serve, Neil Buddy Shah (chair), Richard Fontaine, Ben Bernanke, and Christopher Stubbs, who joined on October 21, 2026, after Kanika Bahl and Zach Robinson concluded their terms in January 2026, Bernanke joined in July 2026, and Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, a trustee since that January, stepped down on August 4, 2026 to become Anthropic's first chief global affairs officer 131214. The board keeps seven seats, one vacant as of this update, with six directors listed: Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, who chairs it, Yasmin Razavi, Reed Hastings, Chris Liddell, and Narasimhan 134. Chief Executive Dario Amodei owns about 2 percent of the company 15.

The founder-control structure this tracker flagged as a possibility in August has now shipped, in a form no other company on this page matches. A Founder LLC initially made up of Anthropic's seven co-founders will, by majority vote, direct a single share of Class F stock worth 50.1 percent of total voting power over key corporate matters, including the election of some directors; the bloc stays active while at least three of the seven founders retain a threshold number of shares and begins to sunset when two or fewer remain 4. Anthropic stays a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation, Class A common stock carries one vote per share, strategic partners get minimal voting rights, and employees receive a separate class that breaks ties on select questions 416. On the post-listing board, the trust elects four of seven seats and Class F and Class A stockholders elect the other three: Daniela Amodei, Dario Amodei, and one director still to be named 4. Anthropic is expected to list on Nasdaq as ANTP in late October or November, targeting a reported valuation near 2 trillion dollars against the 965 billion dollars it carried after its 65 billion dollar May round, with at least 518 billion dollars in decade-long infrastructure commitments, about 80 percent of them noncancelable, explaining why it needs the capital 1611. The founders also pledged 80 percent of their personal Anthropic equity to charity 4. So the stack this tracker once hypothesized is now fact: founder votes amplified far beyond a 2 percent chief-executive stake, and a board majority held by a trust with no stake at all. Public buyers supply the capital and sit outside both layers.

How control actually moved, 2023 to 2027

• September 19, 2023: Anthropic publishes the Long-Term Benefit Trust structure: Class T stock, phased board seats, majority within four years 12.
• March 28, 2025: xAI acquires X Holdings 2.
• October 28, 2025: OpenAI's restructuring completes; the OpenAI Foundation controls OpenAI Group PBC and takes conventional equity 10.
• January 2026: xAI closes a 20 billion dollar Series E, upsized from a 15 billion dollar target 2.
• January 2026: Kanika Bahl and Zach Robinson conclude their terms on Anthropic's trust; Mariano-Florentino Cuellar joins 12.
• February 2, 2026: SpaceX completes the xAI merger; xAI becomes a wholly owned subsidiary at reported valuations of 1 trillion dollars for SpaceX and 250 billion for xAI, with xAI shares exchanged at 0.1433 SpaceX shares apiece 2.
• March 31, 2026: OpenAI closes a round with 122 billion dollars in committed capital at an 852 billion dollar post-money valuation 11.
• April 14, 2026: Anthropic appoints Vas Narasimhan to its board; directors chosen by the Long-Term Benefit Trust become a board majority, seventeen months ahead of the deadline 3.
• April 16, 2026: Meta Platforms files its proxy statement, the document of record for the Zuckerberg Class B lock 5.
• April 24, 2026: Alphabet files its proxy statement, printing the founders' 27.4 and 25.3 percent voting-power figures 1.
• May 2026: Anthropic raises 65 billion dollars at a 965 billion dollar valuation 11.
• June 2026: Anthropic confidentially files an IPO prospectus; OpenAI files its own a week later 15.
• Mid-2026: SpaceX goes public; the post-IPO count puts Musk at approximately 42 percent of equity with more than 80 percent of voting power 8.
• July 2026: Ben Bernanke joins the Long-Term Benefit Trust 12.
• August 4, 2026: Trustee Mariano-Florentino Cuellar steps down to become Anthropic's first chief global affairs officer; the trustee roster returns to three 14.
• September 24, 2026: Reuters and The Information report Anthropic's supervoting proposal: seven co-founders, 50.1 percent of the vote, held through a Founder LLC 16.
• September 28, 2026: Reuters details the IPO filing: the Class F bloc, four trust seats on a seven-member board, and a target valuation near 2 trillion dollars 4.
• September 29, 2026: OpenAI delays its IPO, citing safety risks, and enters talks for at least 30 billion dollars at about a 1.4 trillion dollar pre-money valuation 11.
• October 21, 2026: Physicist Christopher Stubbs joins the Long-Term Benefit Trust, bringing the roster to four of the five seats the trust was designed for 1312.

The tracker updates whenever one of these documents moves: a charter amendment, the spring proxy filings, or a registration statement going public. Anthropic's prospectus has now moved it, and the market's first clean answer to what a frontier lab's votes actually cost is scheduled for a late-October-or-November listing at a reported target near 2 trillion dollars 4. The watch list from here: the shareholder vote on Anthropic's dual-class charter, the terms OpenAI finally prints for its delayed debut and its reported 30 billion dollar bridge round, and the spring 2027 proxies from Alphabet and Meta 11.