Anthropic pledges 5 per cent of its shares to a public fund

The stake is built to grow. For every 50 per cent rise in Anthropic’s value above an undisclosed starting point, the board can add another 2 per cent, CNBC reports. Anthropic gives examples of how the fund could spend: bolder work on jobs lost to AI, payments made straight to groups of people and large gifts to charities. It has already committed $200 million to studying the jobs problem.

The fund is a limited liability company that Anthropic owns outright, so it can switch between kinds of giving. Anthropic says none of its shares go to lobbying or political donations. Add the founders’ pledge to give away 80 per cent of their equity and a matched staff donation scheme, and about a fifth of the company is earmarked for public good, by Anthropic’s count.

The move comes ahead of Anthropic’s planned stock market listing. Lise Buyer of IPO adviser Class V Group told CNBC it is “beneficial from an image perspective”. Who picks the grants is the open question, TechCrunch points out: Anthropic has published no governance rules for the fund so far.

If your team pays for Claude, the company behind it has now tied part of its own growth to public causes, pending a stockholder vote.