Anthropic said it would commit 5% of its shares — potentially more if it hits unspecified revenue targets — to a public-benefit fund, the latest effort by frontier AI labs to head off political backlash over the technology’s impact on jobs and society.
Its rival OpenAI has similarly discussed handing a 5% stake to the US government, as both companies gear up for record-breaking IPOs in the face of increasingly negative public reactions to their technological advances.
That worry is coloring political debate, too: Anthropic has been circulating a draft AI safety bill in Congress, but Semafor’s senior tech correspondent noted that the proposal is “to some, no longer being perceived as strong enough.”
— Prashant Rao