The 'AI Lottery' Held by a Bankrupt Crypto Exchange: How It Almost Became a $75 Billion Fortune

Imagine this: you are in desperate need of cash, so you sell an old painting you bought as a hobby at a flea market for a bargain price. You heave a sigh of relief, thinking you’ve at least put out the immediate fire. But just two years later, you see on the news that the painting you sold was actually an unpublished masterpiece by a genius artist of the century, and its current auction value is in the tens of billions of dollars. It’s the kind of agonizing story that would make you lose sleep for nights out of sheer frustration.

Surprisingly, this exact scenario has actually unfolded right in the middle of the global financial and high-tech markets. The protagonists of this story are FTX, the global cryptocurrency exchange that collapsed under fraud charges, and Anthropic, a company currently possessing some of the world’s most advanced AI technology. Anthropic is famous for creating the high-performance artificial intelligence ‘Claude,’ widely considered the most formidable rival to ChatGPT.

As the AI assistants inside your smartphones and corporate workflow systems get smarter day by day, the size of the fortune this bankrupt exchange missed out on is snowballing every single day. How did such a movie-like scenario come to be?

Why It Matters

This story is more than just financial market gossip or a tale about other people’s money. Simply put, it serves as a historical indicator showing just how unimaginably fast and massive the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is currently growing, and how this explosive surge in value is completely overturning even the tragic debt liquidation of a bankrupt company.

Let’s rewind the clock to when FTX collapsed. Millions of ordinary retail investors and customers were on the verge of losing their life savings forever. Due to the founder’s massive fraud, the company’s vaults were empty, and because the scale of the damage was so enormous, the chances of getting their money back seemed virtually zero.

However, a miraculous, unexpected twist occurred. The value of cutting-edge tech companies that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried had previously invested in via venture capital (capital invested in startups) absolutely exploded, riding the wave of the recent massive ‘AI boom.’

Consequently, the phenomenal advancement of AI technology unintentionally became a massive ‘lifeline’ rescuing countless crypto fraud victims from the swamp of despair. The dazzling growth of the AI technology we entrust every day to summarize our emails and translate complex documents has become a financial miracle that restored someone else’s lost life savings. By carefully examining the full story of this dramatic event, we can most vividly feel the disruptive power and massive wealth transfer of the AI era we are living through right now.

The Explainer: How a $500 Million Seedling Became a $75 Billion Giant Tree

To easily understand the background of this complex event, let’s go back in time a bit. During the days when the exchange was booming and riding high, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried boldly invested massive amounts of funds, including customers’ money, into promising early-stage venture companies.

To use an analogy: it was like blindly scattering countless seeds on a barren wasteland that no one cared about, seeing only its future potential. And among the many seeds he sowed, the one that bloomed the most brilliantly and massively was the AI startup ‘Anthropic.’

He made a massive bet of $500 million on Anthropic Sam Bankman-Fried: The $100B Anthropic AI Missed Bet. Through this investment, FTX managed to secure roughly an 8% stake in this promising company. More accurately, they secured a 7.84% stake on a diluted basis (the effective ownership percentage calculated in advance to defend against dilution even if the company receives more investments or issues shares to employees) FTX’s former Anthropic stake would be worth about $75B at today’s valuation.

To simplify this situation again, it’s like boldly buying 8% of the land deeds in an empty field rumored to become a new city, only for that exact spot to become the prime real estate right in the middle of the world’s busiest, state-of-the-art financial hub just a few years later.

But in late 2022, tragedy struck. FTX was shattered when it was discovered that they had secretly siphoned off massive customer funds. At the time bankruptcy proceedings began, the compensation amount (shortfall) FTX urgently had to return to customers after scraping its empty vaults amounted to a staggering $8 billion to $9 billion FTX’s former Anthropic stake would be worth about $75B at today’s valuation.

The bankruptcy estate (the legal representative tasked with forcibly managing the bankrupt company’s remaining assets and paying off debts on behalf of creditors) was in a desperate situation to pay off the debts immediately. So, they had to rush to sell off all of FTX’s valuable assets on the market. Naturally, the Anthropic stake, one of their largest assets, was also put up for auction. This precious stake was eventually hurriedly liquidated for between $884 million and $1.3 billion around March 2024, right in the middle of the bankruptcy proceedings Anthropic releases audiobook of Claude’s Constitution narrated by …, The $100 Billion Mistake: How FTX’s Bankruptcy Estate Undersold ….

According to documents submitted to the bankruptcy court at the time, Anthropic’s total enterprise value was already highly evaluated at between $18.4 billion and $30 billion FTX Estate to Monetize AI Investment, Seeks Sale of Anthropic Shares …. From the bankruptcy estate’s perspective, they might have consoled themselves thinking they did a pretty good job generating a solid return by selling a stake bought for $500 million for around $1 billion.

However, their painful miscalculation lay in the fact that they completely failed to factor in the most crucial variable: ‘time’. This sale was a hasty disposal executed just before the massive explosion of the AI industry that would shake the global industrial structure truly began, long before the true value of AI startups had been fully evaluated by the market FTX Owned Anthropic, Solana And SpaceX, Then Had To Sell Too Soon.

Where We Stand: The Painful Mistake of Missing Out on $75 Billion

Shortly after the bankruptcy estate sold off the Anthropic stake, a literal Big Bang occurred in the global artificial intelligence market. ‘Claude,’ the AI model developed by Anthropic, proved its remarkable, near-human reasoning capabilities and outstanding stability, gaining explosive popularity among global enterprises and individual users. Naturally, its corporate valuation began to skyrocket boundlessly every single day.

According to various reports and expert estimates published as of 2026, Anthropic’s total enterprise value is conservatively estimated at $380 billion, and based on the latest reports from sources like Reuters, it is valued at an astonishing $965 billion SBF’s Lost Fortune: How the Anthropic IPO Redefines the Ledger of the FTX Collapse, FTX’s former Anthropic stake would be worth about $75B at today’s valuation.

Can you grasp how massive this number is in reality? $965 billion is an astronomical figure that is more than double the entire annual national budget of South Korea. A single AI startup, in just a few years, is being recognized for an unbelievable value capable of funding an entire nation’s household twice over.

Then, what would have happened if FTX hadn’t gone bankrupt and had kept that exact stake (about 8%) intact to this day?

As mentioned earlier, the total amount of debt FTX had to repay its customers was in the $8 billion to $9 billion range. In other words, a mind-boggling calculation emerges: had they just held onto this single Anthropic stake, they could have paid off all their bankruptcy debts several times over and still had tens of billions of dollars to spare. Ultimately, the bankruptcy estate prematurely cut open the belly of the ‘goose that lays the golden eggs’ at a bargain price of less than 5% of the future value this stake would eventually reach FTX Owned Anthropic, Solana And SpaceX, Then Had To Sell Too Soon.

The same goes for the imprisoned Sam Bankman-Fried personally. Had his company not gone bankrupt back then, he alone would have monopolized massive investment returns of over $30 billion—an amount equivalent to the entire corporate valuation of FTX at its absolute peak SBF’s Lost Fortune: How the Anthropic IPO Redefines the Ledger of the FTX Collapse.

Other Golden Eggs Were Also Sold at a Bargain

For example, the $200,000 stake invested in the early-stage coding AI startup Cursor through its subsidiary Alameda Research was disposed of during the bankruptcy proceedings at its original investment cost without any premium. However, following recent news of an acquisition offer from SpaceX, this company’s valuation has skyrocketed to a staggering $3 billion The $100 Billion Mistake: How FTX’s Bankruptcy Estate Undersold …. Similarly, the 58 million Solana (SOL) tokens held by FTX were hurriedly sold at auction at a bargain basement price of $64 each, far below market value The $100 Billion Mistake: How FTX’s Bankruptcy Estate Undersold ….

Sam Bankman-Fried himself is currently pleading his innocence from inside prison every day, arguing that “if the bankruptcy estate hadn’t forcibly sold off the assets at a bargain but held onto them well until now, the total value of the entire investment portfolio, including Anthropic and SpaceX, would currently be worth a staggering $114 billion based on market value” Could FTX’s Assets Be Worth $114B Today? Fact-Checking SBF’s Claim.

Some experts assess that if this unprecedented fraud scandal and bankruptcy had never happened, Sam Bankman-Fried might have instantly climbed to the position of the richest person in the world as of 2026 Sam Bankman-Fried: The $100B Anthropic AI Missed Bet.

However, even this dazzling achievement of a dramatic investment home run will never be able to permanently cover up his dark label of committing the “worst financial fraud in history” by illegally tampering with customer funds Sam Bankman-Fried: The $100B Anthropic AI Missed Bet. Ironically, the fact that FTX’s fraud victims and creditors, who almost lost their life savings, are now able to safely recover almost all of their damages is not purely because the cryptocurrency business did well. It is entirely thanks to AI technology investment assets like Anthropic miraculously hitting the jackpot inside their empty vaults Sam Bankman-Fried: The $100B Anthropic AI Missed Bet.

What’s Next

Watching this astronomical spike in valuations, some worryingly recall the ‘Dot-com Bubble’ of the late 1990s, when the stock prices of IT companies skyrocketed purely on expectations without any clear substance, only to crash later. But the AI market we are witnessing today is fundamentally different in quality from back then.

If the past Dot-com Bubble was led by ‘hollow’ startups surviving on debt with nothing but a single website to their name, today’s AI investments are different. They are being driven by massive tech giants (Big Tech) that are already directly earning enormous amounts of cash in the global market, thoroughly funding and leading the charge with their own massive capital AI Bubble: Is It Real? When Will It Burst? Data-Backed 2026 ….

For instance, Anthropic’s fiercest competitor, OpenAI, recorded a staggering $20 billion in actual revenue in 2025 alone. And based on this, they have embarked on an ultra-long-term infrastructure investment plan amounting to an incredible $1.4 trillion AI Bubble: Is It Real? When Will It Burst? Data-Backed 2026 ….

Anthropic, too, is explosively expanding its practical usability far beyond simple stock market expectations. The data units, akin to ‘small puzzle pieces,’ that AI consumes when it reads, understands, and generates responses are called Tokens. Simply put, they are like the ‘fuel’ AI uses to think. Recently, the token usage leveraging Anthropic’s top-tier models has literally been surging exponentially State of the Themes: June 2026 - Citrini Research.

Especially in high-stakes fields like medicine, law, technology, and finance, where not a single margin of error is tolerated, these cutting-edge AI models are actually assisting humans and creating massive financial value and productivity State of the Themes: June 2026 - Citrini Research. Now, the only task left for Anthropic and other AI companies is to fully anchor this astonishing technological advancement into our daily lives and step fully into the monetization phase State of the Themes: June 2026 - Citrini Research.

In conclusion, the FTX bankruptcy estate had no choice but to sell the precious stake under the desperate market conditions of the time. However, looking back later, the moment they sold it at a bargain was merely the very humble beginning of a massive AI revolution era that will completely change human life FTX Owned Anthropic, Solana And SpaceX, Then Had To Sell Too Soon. As AI technology deeply takes responsibility for more areas of our daily lives and professional worlds in the future, even this massive ‘$75 billion’ figure we currently gaze at in amazement might become just another small historical record that people talk about later, saying, “it was cheap back then.”

MindTickleBytes AI Reporter’s Perspective: Ironically, the final investment portfolio left behind in prison by the financial fraudster who shook the century has become a miraculous lifeline rescuing innocent victims, thanks to the explosive growth of the most innovative AI technology. The overwhelming value-creation power of the AI industry, capable of easily filling even the massive tens-of-billions-of-dollars financial sinkhole dug by the founder’s endless greed, is simply astonishing. This dramatic narrative of saving the fate of a bankrupt company drowning in debt serves as the most bitter yet perfect proof that we are currently passing through history’s greatest wealth restructuring and technological inflection point simultaneously. The landscape of this era, watching a golden egg sold at a bargain to overcome an immediate crisis grow into a $75 billion goose, will be recorded in the future as the most ironic event in tech history.

References

1. FTX’s former Anthropic stake would be worth about $75B at today’s valuation
2. The $100 Billion Mistake: How FTX’s Bankruptcy Estate Undersold …
3. Sam Bankman-Fried: The $100B Anthropic AI Missed Bet
4. FTX Estate to Monetize AI Investment, Seeks Sale of Anthropic Shares …
5. Anthropic releases audiobook of Claude’s Constitution narrated by …
6. Could FTX’s Assets Be Worth $114B Today? Fact-Checking SBF’s Claim
7. FTX Owned Anthropic, Solana And SpaceX, Then Had To Sell Too Soon
8. SBF’s Lost Fortune: How the Anthropic IPO Redefines the Ledger of the FTX Collapse

9. [FTX’s Investment in Anthropic Could Have Been Worth $28 Billion Had It Not Collapsed

   KuCoin](https://www.kucoin.com/news/flash/ftx-s-anthropic-investment-could-have-been-worth-28-billion-had-it-not-collapsed)

10. [Anthropic, Solana, Bitcoin Miners, SpaceX : FTX’s Visionary Bets That Bankruptcy Liquidated

    Crowdfund Insider](https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2026/03/267961-anthropic-solana-bitcoin-miners-spacex-ftxs-visionary-bets-that-bankruptcy-liquidated/)

11. AI Bubble: Is It Real? When Will It Burst? Data-Backed 2026 …
12. State of the Themes: June 2026 - Citrini Research