Elon Musk and Anthropic will give away billions of dollars in shares to try and ease panic about artificial intelligence.
Anthropic, which makes Claude, said that least 5 per cent of its shares would be put into a “public benefit fund” that is intended to respond to concerns about the effects of AI. The company is planning an initial public offering that could value it at up to $1 trillion – which would mean that the fund is worth $50 billion.
It did not say what that money would be used for, though it ruled out political lobbying, and suggested that it was yet to decide. It said that it “might explore” the possibility of “large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations”.
After Anthropic’s announcement, Mr Musk said more specifically that he would distribute some of his shares to people. He did not explicitly say that it was intended to change people’s view of AI, or that it was a response to Anthropic’s announcement.
“Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America,” Mr Musk said in a post to his social platform X. “This will be the first of many.”
At the time of publication, SpaceX shares are worth just under $150, having risen more than 2 per cent in the wake of Mr Musk’s announcement. There are roughly 72 million children in America, valuing the giveaway at over $10 billion, though it represents only a small portion of Mr Musk’s 4.8 billion total shares.
Anthropic was less specific about the value of its fund. It said that it would initially commit 5 per cent of shares to the work, but that a further 2 per cent would be added “for every 50 per cent increase in the company’s value above a set baseline”.
“Because of the way the Fund is structured, the more Anthropic grows, the larger the share of the company that can be dedicated expressly to the public good,” it said.
“It is common practice for tech companies to offer escalating compensation awards to their executives. We are instead directing that equity to the public benefit.”
It said that it would share more about the way the fund would work, including those valuation milestones, in the “coming months”. It also committed to report on its progress through a public benefit report.
Anthropic was already founded as a public benefit corporation, a structure that is intended to show that it is working to make the world better as well as maximise shareholder value. That does not come with any particular requirements about the work it does, however.
It said that most of the work in pursuit of that mission “takes place inside the company” at the moment, pointing to work on AI safety, biomedical research, and giving discounted access to Claude for researchers. The fund will have more “flexibility and scale, enabling us to pursue our mission in new ways”, it claimed.
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