Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been appointed to Anthropic’s long-term benefit trust, an oversight body meant to keep the artificial intelligence company accountable to its public mission.
Bernanke, an economist who is currently a distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution, led the Federal Reserve during the 2008 global financial crisis and recovery. Prior to his time in government, Bernanke was chair of the economics department at Princeton University, and earned a Nobel Prize for his work researching the Great Depression.
The appointment comes at a time of increased anxiety about the societal impact of AI, from its potential to replace a wide swath of white-collar jobs to concerns that rapid spending on the new technology is fueling a financial bubble. Anthropic, which is one of the most valuable startups in the world, will now have Bernanke to advise on such topics.
Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei has predicted that increasingly advanced AI technology could replace as much as half of all white-collar work in the coming years.
“The potential of artificial intelligence is enormous, and so is the range of outcomes,” Bernanke said in a statement Thursday announcing his appointment. “How that potential plays out will depend, in part, on the institutions we build around it.”
As members of Anthropic’s long-term benefit trust, Bernanke and his three fellow trustees have the ability to appoint a majority of the members of the corporate board of directors, as well as remove the directors they appoint.
Members of the trust don’t hold a financial stake in the company, and their role is meant to ensure that Anthropic as a public benefit corporation is balancing the public’s interest alongside those of investors. Anthropic said the trustees are expected to advise top management on critical decisions, including those involving the risks and societal impacts of AI.
“Anthropic has created a unique governance structure to try to ensure that the long-run benefits of AI for humanity far outweigh the risks,” Bernanke said.
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The company’s Claude models have become more effective at some on-the-job tasks, particularly in the area of coding. The success of the coding agent has helped boost Anthropic to a valuation of nearly $1 trillion, and the company is expected to conduct an initial public offering later this year.
The AI startup has also faced political hurdles. Anthropic temporarily pulled its Mythos and Fable models off the market last month in a dispute with the Trump administration over the cybersecurity of the products. It has also engaged in a legal battle with the Pentagon over the use of the company’s AI models.
“AI may have the most significant economic effects of any technology in modern history, and Anthropic has a dual responsibility to understand those effects and to act on them,” Daniela Amodei, the company’s co-founder and president, said in the statement. Bernanke’s “judgment will make us better at anticipating and responding to how advanced AI affects workforces and economies around the world,” she said.
Bernanke joins Neil Buddy Shah, Richard Fontaine, and Mariano-Florentino Cuellar on the long-term benefit trust. Anthropic said it plans to add another trustee in the future.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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