Anthropic says it’s committing 5% of its shares to a ‘public benefit fund’

Anthropic said it is establishing a public benefit fund and will set aside 5% of its shares for it, an arrangement the company said will give it more room and scale to back projects intended to benefit society. The fund will be set up as a wholly owned entity inside Anthropic. The announcement affects the company's ownership structure and the nonprofit and direct-payment efforts the fund could eventually finance.

Anthropic left open the possibility of adding to the commitment. For every 50% rise in Anthropic's value, the company would have the option to contribute another 2% of its shares. The company did not detail how the fund's holdings would be valued or when such contributions would be triggered.

The company offered only broad outlines of how the money could be spent, citing large donations to traditional nonprofits and direct distributions to specific populations as examples. Anthropic said it will release more information about the fund's structure and governance in the coming months, leaving unresolved who will decide which causes receive funding.

The fund arrives as Anthropic has already put $200 million toward studying how AI might affect the job market. The company said that given the pace of AI progress, more ambitious approaches may be necessary, and that the fund will have the flexibility to pursue them. It did not specify how the new fund would relate to that existing research commitment.

Anthropic's move comes as the AI industry confronts increasingly negative public sentiment. CEO Dario Amodei has characterized the situation as fundamentally a crisis of trust. The fund is being announced against that backdrop, though the company did not directly link the two in its description of how the money would be used.

For a US technology audience, the announcement touches on questions of corporate governance and public accountability that have followed large AI developers as their valuations have grown. Anthropic's disclosure that the fund sits inside the company, rather than as an independent foundation, bears on how much outside visibility the public will have into its decisions. The company has not said how the fund will be overseen or reported on.

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