Anthropic pledges 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund that could pay displaced workers

Anthropic says it will commit 5% of its shares to a new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, subject to stockholder approval, TechCrunch reports. The board can add another 2% for every 50% increase in the company’s value above a baseline it has not disclosed, so the fund is designed to grow with the company. Anthropic floated uses ranging from large gifts to traditional nonprofits to direct distributions to specific populations, citing AI’s effect on jobs as one example. It has already committed $200 million to studying that problem and now says bolder approaches may be needed.

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation and says most mission work, including safety and interpretability research, biomedical research and discounted Claude access for nonprofits, stays inside the company. It says its co-founders pledged at founding to donate 80% of their equity and about half its employees join an equity donation match; with the new fund, it puts the share of stock dedicated to the public good at roughly 20%. CEO Dario Amodei has called the industry’s sinking public standing a crisis of trust. CNBC reports Anthropic told investors its third-quarter revenue is $16.8 billion, with the IPO reportedly slated for November (Anthropic’s trustees and IPO).

Tech companies routinely give executives equity awards that grow with the stock; Anthropic says it is pointing that escalating structure at the public. If AI creates enormous value while unsettling many jobs, tying a growing share of the upside to those absorbing the shock goes further than another research grant. The phrase ‘direct distributions to specific populations’ stands out: a frontier lab openly contemplating paying people, possibly workers whose jobs its products change, an implicit admission that studying disruption may not be enough.

The fund is a wholly owned LLC, not a 501(c)(3) charity. Anthropic says that allows flexibility between kinds of giving and promises none of the fund’s equity will go to lobbying or political giving. But with governance unpublished, the baseline undisclosed and further contributions at board discretion, it is more promise than structure: a charity answers to tax law and disclosure rules, an LLC to whoever runs it. An IPO adviser told CNBC the move is partly groundwork for going public and partly reputation management; Elon Musk suggested on X that the shares simply go to the public.

If it scales, companies reshaping the labor market would also run large private funds cushioning the shock, potentially helpful but concentrating social power in a few labs and possibly substituting for public policy. Published governance and outside input on how money moves are the key tests. More in our Anthropic coverage, future of work coverage and business coverage.