Elon Musk on Monday pledged to give one share of his company SpaceX to “every kid in America” next year.
The offer arrived a day after artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced in a social media post that it will commit 5 per cent of its shares to a new “public benefit” fund.
In a response to that Sunday post, Musk wrote, “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public.”
Shares of SpaceX, which will report its quarterly earnings on Tuesday, closed at $146.03 on Friday.
With approximately 73 million children under the age of 18 in the United States, that would put the value of Musk's pledge at about $10.66 billion.
Anthropic said Sunday that the shares it is committing will go to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new entity within the company. The fund's worth will potentially increase as the shares grow in value.
Musk did not provide further details on how his share pledge will be carried out, but did add in his post that “This will be the first of many.”
The announcements by Musk and Anthropic arrive as Americans grow increasingly wary of AI. A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that most Americans, 64 per cent, think AI is developing “too fast,” while 27 per cent say its development has been “about right” and only 8 per cent say it’s moving “too slow”.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceXAI’s Musk and other prominent industry leaders said last month that AI’s development needs to slow down. The consensus came after an Anthropic researcher resigned with a dire warning about the threats the technology poses to humanity. But obstacles including domestic and global competition, profit motivations and pushback from US President Donald Trump all stand in the way of a coordinated effort to pace AI’s development.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and the company’s five other cofounders established Anthropic as a public benefit corporation, a designation that for-profit companies select to balance financial goals and social impact.
Anthropic is planning a massive initial public offering as soon as November. In June the company said that it had submitted a confidential filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for its proposed IPO.
That same month, Musk's SpaceX made its Wall Street debut as a publicly traded company and made Musk the world's first trillionaire. Shares of SpaceX are down 35.3 per cent since peaking days after that initial public offering, however, meaning Musk is a billionaire.