The founders of Anthropic have created a traditional board responsible to shareholders and installed the LTBT to pick board members, a departure from OpenAI’s non-profit model. The Trust consists of “five financially disinterested members” there to help “align our corporate governance with our mission of developing and maintaining advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity,” the company said. However, the structure is not risk-free as board members will have responsibilities to shareholders, but they won’t easily forget those who nominated them and why they did it. They’ll have to find a way to balance the two. The structure should make Anthropic more stable than OpenAI but not entirely immune to a repeat of the Altman situation.
Key takeaways:
- Anthropic, an AI company, is in a prime position to take advantage of OpenAI’s recent missteps, having collected billions in investment from Amazon, Google, and others as it developed similar technology with a focus on safety.
- Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation with a unique board structure. A separate, Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT) will select most of its board members over time, with a mandate to focus on AI safety.
- The founders of Anthropic claim to be more concerned with safety than OpenAI and have created a traditional board responsible to shareholders and installed the LTBT to pick board members, a departure from OpenAI’s non-profit model.
- Anthropic's governance should be stable enough to make customers feel comfortable working with the company, at least in the coming years. This is a significant benefit after OpenAI’s chaos showed the risks of betting on a single model.