‘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,’ the company said.
AI giant Anthropic is to assign a portion of its company shares to a funding entity dedicated to making donations in aid of “the public good”, it said yesterday (18 October).
The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund will see an initial commitment of 5pc of the company’s shares, subject to stockholder approval, with a further 2pc added – at board discretion – for every 50pc increase in the company’s value above a set baseline, according to a blogpost.
The company behind the Claude AI models said that “as a public benefit corporation”, its research activities “have both a public benefit component and for-profit value, so we house them directly in the company”.
It added: “The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund will have increased flexibility and scale, enabling us to pursue our mission in new ways. For example, we might explore large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations.”
The new fund will be a wholly-owned LLC, according to Anthropic, with the aim of offering “adjustability between different forms of giving”. The company added that none of the Anthropic equity held by the LLC will be used for lobbying or political giving in the US or elsewhere.
“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,” the blogpost read.
“In the coming months, we will share more about the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund’s structure and governance, including the valuation milestones that may add to its stake. We will also report on our progress to date against our mission in an upcoming public benefit report.”
Anthropic cited “research relevant to AI safety and interpretability” as one of the potential key focus areas of its new fund.
Earlier this month, the company announced plans to expand its AI security for critical infrastructure.
In September, it finalised an agreement for Accenture to independently evaluate Anthropic’s frontier AI developments.
Last week, more than 400 high-profile AI experts, including Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton and Turing Award winner Ron Rivest, urged frontier model makers to work with governments in order to create an international standards body to improve AI containment and safety standards.
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