In a darkened open-plan office at night, one man in a hooded sweatshirt works at a laptop partway along a long bench of desks lined with empty black chairs, city lights showing through tall windows behind him.

The Public Share

Anthropic Pledges 5 Percent of Itself to a Fund

Anthropic pledges 5 percent of its shares to a fund it would wholly own, subject to stockholder approval; Elon Musk answered with a SpaceX pledge.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 18 — Anthropic said on Sunday that it would commit 5 percent of its shares to its new, wholly owned Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, subject to stockholder approval. The board could add another 2 percentage points at its discretion for every 50 percent rise in the company’s value above an undisclosed baseline.

“It is common practice for tech companies to offer escalating compensation awards to their executives,” the company wrote. “We are instead directing that equity to the public benefit.” Two days earlier, Anthropic had published a study of its own workforce documenting changes in hiring amid extensive use of AI at the maker of Claude.

The fund, the study and Elon Musk’s answer, which came within a day, turned the argument over artificial intelligence and jobs toward a question of ownership: who should hold a stake in the companies building it. Anthropic said on June 1 that it had confidentially submitted a draft registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and CNBC reported on Sunday that the offering was “reportedly slated for November.” The fund announcement did not mention it.

The study, published on Friday, draws on the company’s internal records and 17 employee interviews. Since early 2025, Anthropic’s study of its own workforce found, the junior share of its technical staff has slipped from 21 percent to 14 percent, and the junior share of its technical hires has fallen faster, from 27 percent to 9 percent. The company has tripled in size in the past year, and its technical hiring has kept growing in absolute numbers. By August, the agents its employees direct were logging six times as many hours as the employees themselves, by the company’s measure.Agent HoursThe count covers agent sessions that employees direct. It sets the agents’ running time, including inference and active tool use but not waits longer than 30 minutes, against a 40-hour week for every employee. Counting autonomous agents too, agent hours first passed human hours in March.

Code commits per engineer were running at five times their rate of six months before. The study’s authors warned that their comparison of engineers who took up coding agents with those who had not could be biased, because “tool adoption is not random.” Comparing code each engineer wrote directly with code the same engineer’s agents wrote, they found no difference in how often it was later removed or reverted, a narrow measure of quality.

The authors framed part of their answer in terms of ownership. They wrote that “it is difficult to imagine a version of pro-worker AI adoption in which workers do not hold a financial stake in successful rollout,” while granting that wide employee ownership of stock is “an easy posture for a company that has seen substantial increases in valuation.” The authors conceded that none of the company’s remedies, among them an early-warning system for jobs at risk and moving staff between departments, “directly address the slowdown in junior hires documented in this report.” “Employment protections for incumbents will not benefit those not hired to begin with,” they wrote.

The Terms

The fund will be a wholly owned limited liability company rather than a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit, a form Anthropic said gives it “adjustability between different forms of giving.” Anthropic said none of the Anthropic equity it holds would be used for lobbying or political giving, in the United States or abroad. The company said it might explore large donations to traditional nonprofits or “direct distributions to specific populations,” and gave AI’s effect on the labor market as one example: it has already committed $200 million to the issue, it said, but “bolder approaches may be needed.”The $200 MillionIn a research agenda published July 22, Anthropic said the sum would go to its Economic Futures Research Fund for outside research, mostly in projects of $5 million to $30 million. The agenda lists pilots testing equity-sharing and dividend-style mechanisms.

Anthropic counts the fund as part of a larger total. Its co-founders pledged at its founding to donate 80 percent of their equity, and about half its employees take part in a program under which the company matches pledges of their shares. With the fund, the company said, “roughly 20% of Anthropic shares will be dedicated to the public good,” plus any additions at the valuation milestones. The figure is the company’s own; it did not show the arithmetic.

Much is left unsaid: Anthropic did not disclose the baseline, put a value on the stake, say who will decide how the fund uses it or say whether its shares will carry votes. It promised to describe the fund’s “structure and governance,” including the valuation milestones, “in the coming months,” and to report on its progress against its mission in a coming public benefit report.A Public Benefit CorporationAnthropic is one. Its directors must balance shareholders’ interests with those of people materially affected by its conduct and with its stated public benefit: to “responsibly develop and maintain advanced AI for the long term benefit of humanity.” Such a company must report on its progress at least once every two years, Reuters reported. Under Delaware law that report goes to stockholders; making it public and having it independently certified are not automatic requirements.

Control is a separate matter. The Verge, describing the draft prospectus Reuters had reviewed, reported in September that the seven co-founders, grouped in a “Founder LLC,” would hold 50.1 percent of the voting power after the offering.

Employment protections for incumbents will not benefit those not hired to begin with.

— The authors of Anthropic’s study of its own workforce

The Answer

Lise Buyer, a partner at the IPO advisory firm Class V Group, told CNBC the timing was “beneficial from an image perspective,” and that the fund could be seen favorably if it paid for retraining or helped workers find other jobs when the technology disrupted theirs. “Of course, it is also to burnish their reputation at a time when AI is coming under significant scrutiny,” she said. An August Pew Research Center report found that 71 percent of U.S. adults thought AI would lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years.

Mr. Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, replied to Anthropic’s post about the fund on X on Sunday: “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public.” He added that that was what he would be doing, and on Monday, CNBC reported, he said he would give one of his own SpaceX shares to every child in the United States next year. “This will be the first of many,” he wrote. He gave no details of how.

CNBC did the arithmetic. There were 72 million children under 18 in the country on July 1, 2025, by census figures; at SpaceX’s closing price of $146.03 on Friday, a share each would come to about $10.5 billion. That is about 1.5 percent of the roughly 4.8 billion SpaceX shares Mr. Musk owns, according to an August filing cited by CNBC. SpaceX has owned xAI, maker of the Grok models and a rival of Anthropic’s, since February.Rival and SupplierSpaceX also agreed in May to supply Anthropic with computing power. Its June prospectus said Anthropic had agreed in May to pay $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for capacity at Colossus and Colossus II, including about 325,000 Nvidia GPUs, at a reduced fee while it ramped up in May and June. After three months, either side may end the agreements on 90 days’ notice.

Mr. Musk’s gift would come out of his own holdings. Anthropic’s co-founders have pledged their own shares, too, but the fund’s stake would come from the company. Its shareholders, who include its employees and investors such as Amazon, whose previously committed $5 billion was part of the round Anthropic raised in May, must approve the plan.AMZNNasdaq240.35▼3.44−1.4%Amazon · Friday’s session The company has not explained how it would provide the fund’s shares or what the effect on existing shareholders would be, and it gave no date for the vote.

The tests come next: the stockholders’ vote, the governance and valuation milestones promised “in the coming months,” and any public filing of the prospectus Anthropic submitted in confidence on June 1. For Mr. Musk, the test is the mechanics of his gift.

Daily Cortex is written with AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude, and fact-checked with OpenAI’s GPT models.

Sources

  1. Anthropic, “Investing in the public benefit,” Oct. 18, 2026.
  2. Anthropic, “How employment is changing at Anthropic (Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory),” Oct. 16, 2026.
  3. Anthropic, “A research agenda for the Economic Futures Research Fund,” July 22, 2026.
  4. Anthropic, “Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC,” June 1, 2026.
  5. Anthropic, “Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation,” May 28, 2026.
  6. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SEC Form 424B4), “Prospectus for the initial public offering of Class A common stock,” June 12, 2026.
  7. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SEC Form 10-Q), “Quarterly report for the quarter ended June 30, 2026,” Aug. 4, 2026.
  8. CNBC, “Anthropic commits 5% of shares to new public benefit fund that could address AI job disruption,” Oct. 18, 2026.
  9. CNBC, “Elon Musk says he’ll give a SpaceX share to every child in America next year,” Oct. 19, 2026.
  10. TechCrunch, “Anthropic says it’s committing 5% of its shares to a ‘public benefit fund’,” Oct. 18, 2026.
  11. The Verge, “Anthropic is committing 5% of its shares to a ‘Public Benefit Fund’,” Oct. 18, 2026.
  12. TechCrunch, “Anthropic says its workforce has become less junior and is spending more time in meetings,” Oct. 17, 2026.
  13. Reuters (via The Star), “Explainer-What is a public benefit corporation, the Anthropic legal structure?” Sept. 29, 2026.
  14. The Verge, “Anthropic warns of ‘catastrophic’ AI risks in its own IPO filing,” Sept. 29, 2026.
  15. X (Elon Musk), “Reply to Anthropic’s announcement of its Public Benefit Fund,” Oct. 18, 2026.
  16. Pew Research Center, “Young adults in the U.S. are increasingly wary of AI, concerned it will take jobs,” Aug. 18, 2026.
  17. State of Delaware, “Delaware Code, Title 8, Chapter 1, Subchapter XV: Public Benefit Corporations.”