Anthropic Commits 5% of Shares to a Public Benefit Fund for the AI Jobs Era

The company behind Claude just made one of the most unusual promises in tech history: as Anthropic gets richer, a slice of the company automatically flows into a fund for the people AI might leave behind.

What Anthropic announced

On Sunday, Anthropic said it plans to commit 5% of its shares to a new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund. Subject to shareholder approval, the fund would start with that 5% stake — and then, at the board's discretion, receive an additional 2% of the company's shares for every 50% increase in Anthropic's valuation above a baseline that hasn't been disclosed yet. In plain terms: the more valuable Anthropic becomes, the bigger the fund gets, automatically.

The fund won't be a traditional charity. It will be structured as a wholly owned limited liability company rather than a tax-exempt nonprofit, giving Anthropic flexibility to move between different kinds of giving — from large donations to established nonprofits to direct cash distributions to specific populations. One hard rule: the shares can't be used for political contributions or lobbying, in the US or anywhere else.

Why jobs are the headline

Anthropic named AI's impact on the labour market as a central focus of the fund, building on a $200 million commitment it had already made to study and address workforce disruption. The numbers behind that concern are stark. An August Pew Research Center report found that 71% of American adults expect AI to lead to fewer jobs in the US over the next two years. IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva said last week that roughly 40% of jobs worldwide will be augmented, downgraded or eliminated by AI — rising to 60% in advanced economies.

That anxiety is already reshaping corporate behaviour: global companies have cut thousands of jobs after investing heavily in AI, with many — mostly tech firms — pointing to efficiency gains from rapid adoption. Anthropic's own CEO, Dario Amodei, has described the industry's problem as "fundamentally a crisis of trust." The fund is, at least in part, an attempt to buy some of that trust back. For a sense of how AI is already rewriting everyday economics, see our explainer on how US retailers use AI to set prices.

The sceptics' questions

Not everyone is applauding. Elon Musk, who runs Anthropic rival xAI, said on X that he recommended "giving the shares directly to the public" — a jab at the fund's structure, which keeps the money inside a company-controlled entity rather than distributing ownership. And there are genuine open questions: who decides what counts as the "public good"? Anthropic says it will share more about governance in the coming months. The baseline valuation that triggers the extra 2% contributions is undisclosed. And a wholly owned LLC, however flexible, is still controlled by the company writing the cheques.

Still, the structure is worth taking seriously precisely because of the context. Anthropic is preparing one of the biggest IPOs in history as a public benefit corporation — a legal form that requires management to weigh broader interests alongside investor profit. Its prospectus reportedly devotes around 80 of its 261 pages to risk factors, including what the company has called potentially "catastrophic" risks from AI. A safety-first lab pledging a growing share of itself to cushion AI's economic damage is either a meaningful innovation in corporate responsibility or the most sophisticated PR in tech. The test will be what the fund actually does once the shares — and the job losses — are real.

The infrastructure race behind all of this isn't slowing down — see our report on Intel's 700-TOPS AI chip plans for 2028. The machines are coming; Anthropic is now betting a slice of itself that society can keep up.

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