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Anthropic Announces 'Public Benefit Fund', Committing 5% of Its Shares (cnbc.com) 49

Posted by EditorDavid from the nickel-defense dept.
"Anthropic says it's committing 5% of its shares to a 'public benefit fund'," reports TechCrunch, "structured as a wholly-owned entity within the company — with the option to contribute an additional 2% for every 50% increase in Anthropic's value."

Important context from CNBC: The timing of Anthropic's public fund announcement is both mandatory to prepare for an initial public offering, and "beneficial from an image perspective," especially as AI reshapes the jobs market, Lise Buyer, partner at IPO advisory firm Class V Group, told CNBC...

Anthropic said it will share more about the fund structure and governance in the coming months, including valuation milestones that may increase the stake. It said it will also share progress on the fund in an upcoming public benefit report. In response to Anthropic's announcement, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on X that he "recommend[s] giving the shares directly to the public."
Anthropic's announcement hints the fund could address job-market displacements. It says the fund "might" explore "large donations to traditional nonprofits" — or, that it "might" explore "direct distributions to specific populations. One example is labor market impacts."

It then argues AI could "cause instability" for many workers. And while Anthropic has already committed $200 million for "studying and addressing" this issue, Sunday's announcement says "bolder" approaches may be needed, and that the Fund "will have the versatility to pursue them."

"Combined with its co-founders' pledge to donate 80% of their equity and an employee donation matching program, roughly 20% of Anthropic's shares will be dedicated to public purposes," reports Reuters, "excluding any additional shares added later."

Anthropic Announces 'Public Benefit Fund', Committing 5% of Its Shares More | Reply

Anthropic Announces 'Public Benefit Fund', Committing 5% of Its Shares

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  • We found a tax break! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Monday October 19, 2026 @12:36AM (#66381736)
    And how to turn our tax break into a PR release!!

    • Re:We found a tax break! (No, we didn't!) (Score:5, Informative)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Monday October 19, 2026 @06:44AM (#66381984) Homepage

      Reality: No. They're forming a wholly-owned LLC, not a 501(c)(3) charity. They're treated as a disregarded entity for tax purposes. Transferring shares from Anthropic to the new LLC is just moving money from Anthropic's left pocket to its right pocket. You don't get a tax deduction from that. To get a deduction from IRC 170, you have to make an irrevocable transfer to a qualified 501(c)(3) charity.

      If Anthropic later donates from this LLC to actual charities, it could then claim a corporate charitable deduction (against up to 10% of their profits - and note that word, profits; also, there's no breaks for UBI programs targeted at individuals). But the formation of this entity and transfer of 5% of their shares to it does not give them any sort of a tax break whatsoever, and there's no difference between donating from this structure to a charity and donating directly from Anthropic. In fact, by forming this structure, they're skipping a potential tax break that they could get by forming and donating to a 501(c)(3) upfront.

      (If your next question is "why not a 501(c)(3), then?", the answer is because there's all sorts of IRS restrictions on 501(c)(3)s, including distributing at least 5% of assets annually, excise taxes on investment gains, strict limits on cash transfers to individuals, etc)

      I get that it's popular for mod points to be cynical, but at least focus your cynicism on factuality. Try this: "We found a PR cheat! And how to turn things our CEO wants to do anyway and might not do until many years from now into a pre-IPO press release!"

    • No point having tax breaks if you don't make a profit. And Anthropic are very, very far away from being profitable.

      Especially with the Chinese open weight models being on average only about 5 months behind Anthropic's frontier models.

      Their business plan is cooked.

      It's just PR to try and buy some goodwill before the IPO, and possibly a way to squirrel away some cash before they inevitably go bankrupt in late 2027/early 2028.

      https://www.wheresyoured.at/de... [wheresyoured.at]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        What do you think selling inherently worthless paper (stocks) is other than profit? That's what's funding this "charity".

        "Especially with the Chinese open weight models being on average only about 5 months behind Anthropic's frontier models."
        Models aren't where the money is. Killing is where the money is, not the decision to kill. Everyone has a model that can figure stuff out, the profit is in benefitting from the sociopathy.

        They don't care about your opinion, they are appealing to the ultra-rich. Comm

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by exa ( 27197 )

      haha!

    • From what i gather about the ideological leanings of anthropics founders, I do believe them that they want to do good. The problem is their definition of good is hopelessly entwined with the "Effective Altruism" movement that seems to be more Sam Bankman Fried than mother teresa.

      less "Lets donate a billion dollars to distribute aids medicine to central afraica" and more "Lets donate a billion dollars to prevent Rokkos Basilisk" (if you dont know what that is, pour yourself a beer and google it and be prepar

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kisai ( 213879 )

      The AI companies are developing their AI on our resources, they should return those resources.

      Giving everyone a share of the company that doesn't pay a dividend, is .. nothing really. What is required is something close to how the Alaska Permanent fund works, except for AI. They MUST pay a dividend, and can not cut the dividend as long as they are revenue positive.

  • I'm sure, as a long-term unemployed software engineer, I'll definately get some relief from that money, and it won't disappear into ad agencies, management consulting fees, and PACs enormous/s/enormous
  • It’s like these people think that every job in the world can be done by a computer. Considering that humanoid robots are completely impracticable as replacements for human workers in most roles, can a computer alone really hang drywall, roof a house, fix the plumbing, teach at a school, and so forth? Are self-driving trucks really practical? Yes, delivery robots are possible, and almost any machine can be further automated. I spend a lot of time in Thailand and it’s almost impossible to think of

    • Who knows what the future holds for those jobs. Today it is more about replacing the better-paying jobs that provide excess money to visit Thailand and feed the economy you just described. Less jobs, less disposable income, fewer trips and tourist money to feed those services.

      • I see your point. To be honest, I don't meet many Americans here. I mostly meet Europeans and Oceanians, though there are a lot of Arabs and Indians that just don't come to my bar. Of the Westerners that I have met here that are not retired, none have had jobs that an AI could replace - construction, ships captain, harbor pilot, and so forth. I haven't met any here, but even programmers don't really seem to be losing opportunity to AI. If your job was to pilot a harvester or something, I can see the concern

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 0123456 ( 636235 )

          > none have had jobs that an AI could replace - construction, ships captain, harbor pilot, and so forth.

          1. All those jobs can be replaced with computers and/or robots.
          2. Who's going to be paying to build houses or ship Chinesium gadgets around the world if the rest of us don't have jobs?

          • Despite technological advances, I don't think that airplanes or ships can or should operate without captains, often in redundancy. I honestly see less chance for machines to replace construction and repair jobs or something like prefab and 3D house printing would already be happening (I know that prefab is real, but it doesn't dominate any market, and there are some limited scale operations and at least one large 3d building printing project that isn't actually practical). Factory farms had already reduced

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 0123456 ( 636235 )

        Yes, exactly. All these people saying "ha-ha, I'll be fine, I have a service job which can't be done by a machine" haven't even thought about where their customers are going to come from if all the people doing productive jobs are replaced by computers.

    • It makes the IPO seem bigger than it is. For a $1trillion IPO, they only need a $950 billion IPO, because 5% will be in the 'fund.'
      • I wonder if they got that strategy tip from an AI. A 5% discount on a trillion-plus valuation of a company with their real revenue and realistic projected revenue in an extremely competitive field where their business model has extremely high relative costs and where frontier models are not in high demand and where local models could soon be sufficient for most uses still wouldn't make me personally want to buy in at any significant scale. But then again, I didn't buy bitcoin, I've sold gold and stocks that

        • . But then again, I didn't buy bitcoin,

          I regret that one. I was going to start mining for fun back when you could do it on a CPU, but I heard some people here on Slashdot making fun of it so I decided not to. Never again. If something looks fun, I don't care what other people say. Also, the Tesla rocket car is sweet, no matter what you think of Elon. Anyone who says otherwise is a hater.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ranton ( 36917 )

      AI doesn't have to replace all jobs to be impactful. Unemployment during the Great Recession peaked at 10%, which was about 5-6% higher than the baseline at the time. The worst recession since the Great Depression that almost took down our economy only required having about 5% of the workforce lose their jobs.

      I don't understand when people make the obvious comment that AI won't remove all jobs as some way of saying there isn't much risk.

      • Obviously outside of my area of expertise, but I don’t think unemployment caused the great depression, nor am I certain that it was the dominant significant consequence. We may be entering another depression, but I don’t see AI itself as a leading cause (investment in AI may be a larger factor). There do seem to be parallels between now and the great depression in terms of borrowing to invest and excessive speculation driving stock prices to unrealistic levels.

        Currently, there seem to be many

  • Itâ(TM)s something I wish more companies would embrace. It might be a tax break, or good pr but still. Not waiting until the founder is in their 60â(TM)s to use the money for some form of public good (or bribery) is good.

  • all they can offer is hallucinations based on a distillation of human work. exactly the stuff they're blaming some "China" for. so do yourselves what you expect of the Chinese, generate your own knowledge from scratch, or pay an appropriate price, thieves :)

  • A Public Benefit Fund is a Slush Fund (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Monday October 19, 2026 @12:58AM (#66381750)
    A Public Benefit Fund (PBF) is a Slush Fund that allows a company to spend money on stuff that does not enhance shareholder value. Its a legal technique to avoid doing what is profitable. Anthropic gets to define whatever the "public benefit" is, and divert shareholder money to it, and shareholders cannot do a damn thing about it. Its a way to fund pet projects of executives without any oversight.

    Sure a PBC (Corporation) or PBF can actually do good, but despite the name it does not have to. "Good" is only in the eyes of those who created the PBF or PBC.

  • I've watched that shit for 20 years with MSFT (Score:5, Interesting)

    by T34L ( 10503334 ) on Monday October 19, 2026 @01:00AM (#66381754)
    Grew up in one of the many countries where Microsoft "paid for" so very much of school equipment, and all that amazing "free" gear cost the schools was curriculum conveniently teaching exclusively use of Microsoft OS and complete office suite. I'm looking towards the "public benefit fund" wholly dedicated to nurturing the public impression that all these elusive jobs are one free retraining making you a loyal Anthropic user away. I've eaten many a "free" lunch over the course of my life and, as a paying Anthropic customer, I'd not feed anything they hand out for the "public benefit" to my dog, or any other living being I'd care about the welfare of.

  • funds (Score:5, Funny)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Monday October 19, 2026 @01:06AM (#66381760)

    > direct distributions to specific populations

    Let me guess, a legal fund for jailed AI Executives?

  • 'Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on X that he "recommend[s] giving the shares directly to the public."'

    Surprising and disappointing given Elon's unearned reputation for intelligence. What he really means is give it directly to him, surely he could have come up with a more creative recommendation. He has plenty of time to do that between paid inseminations, right?

    And Tesla gives far more than 5%, after all Elon is a member of the public.

  • And that foundation is hardly ever going to result in actual public benefit, all that money usually goes to rich intermediaries

  • They can go and f... off with their pretend game.

  • Screw that (Score:3)

    by whitroth ( 9367 ) <whitroth@5-c[ ].us ['ent' in gap]> on Monday October 19, 2026 @01:01PM (#66382610) Homepage

    I want them, and their execs, to PAY THEIR TAXES.

    Which need to be returned to at least 1972 levels - 72%, no5 22%.

  • The old 5% tax write off fund.

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