Anthropic’s $2 trillion IPO puts powerful external trustees in spotlight

Anthropic’s prospective public-market investors must reckon with an external group of trustees that control the majority of the AI company’s board, as its planned blockbuster initial public offering forces close scrutiny of its experimental governance structure. The company’s Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT) is a small group of advisers created to safeguard the lab’s mission of developing AI for the long-term benefit of humanity, even as commercial pressures intensify. The trust holds no equity in Anthropic, but has significant influence, with the San Francisco-based company planning to preserve its role after a stock market debut that could value the Claude maker at as much as $2 trillion. The LTBT, which is the controlling governance mechanism of the Anthropic public benefit corporation, has the right to appoint or dismiss the majority of the company’s board. It has selected four of Anthropic’s seven directors, including Netflix’s co-founder Reed Hastings and Vas Narasimhan, chief executive of Novartis. Currently, the LTBT has three members out of a potential maximum of five, chaired by Neil Buddy Shah, chief executive of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, alongside former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke and Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security. Mariano-Florentino “Tino” Cuéllar, a former California Supreme Court justice, left the trust after a few months to work as Anthropic’s chief global affairs officer. Anthropic is attempting to establish a template for future AI governance through the trust, said multiple people close to its plans. They said the ambition for the LTBT is to provide an industry blueprint, similar to the GAAP accounting principles, which initially emerged as voluntary standards proposed by private companies. The incident led to most of the board members being replaced and a broader restructuring of the startup.