Anthropic announced on Thursday that it has roped-in former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to gather his insights on the long-term impacts that AI could have on the global economy. Bernanke will be joining Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT), that serves as an independent body to ensure Anthropic stays aligned with its OpenAI-like “AI for humanity” mission.
A Nobel laureate, Bernanke, chaired the U.S. Federal Reserve between February 2006 and January 2014. He steered the world’s largest economy through the 2008 market crash that had resulted in the world stock markets losing over $30 trillion of wealth as per World Bank estimations.
Joining Anthropic, Bernanke will be advising the Claude-maker on the way AI would reshape macroeconomics and the global labour markets.
“The potential of artificial intelligence is enormous, and so is the range of outcomes. How that potential plays out will depend, in part, on the institutions we build around it,” Bernanke said.
While the LTBT was conceptualized by Anthropic founders at the time of launching the company in 2021, it was brought to life in September 2023.
Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation, meaning the company was created to balance commercial success with generating social and public good. The members of this body work with Anthropic to keep a balance between the company’s commercial success and its role in doing good for the public. The LTBT essentially keeps a check on how Anthropic creates and deploys AI.
“The LTBT has the authority to appoint members to Anthropic’s board. The Trustees advise the board and Anthropic’s leadership on critical decisions, particularly those involving the potential risks and societal impacts of AI,” the company explained.
Neil Buddy Shah, the CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, serves as the chairperson of the LTBT. Other members on the trust include Richard Fontaine and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar.
New trustees for the LTBT are selected by the existing ones, in consultation with Anthropic.
Commenting on Bernanke’s appointment to the LTBT, Shah said, “Ben spent eight years leading the Federal Reserve and guided the country through the worst financial crisis in nearly a century with expertise, independence, and sound judgment. That’s the standard we look for in Trustees as AI’s impact grows.”
Bernanke, like other LTBT trustees, will now get access to Anthropic’s Class T stock that gives the holders dominating voting power to elect and remove a majority of the company’s corporate board directors. This way, Anthropic ensures that AI safety is prioritized over financial profits.
As autonomous agents start pushing into corporate enterprise budgets and rewriting the rules of corporate employment, gathering economic elites to help navigate the headwinds seems like a smart move by companies like Anthropic. Perhaps, AI players like OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to stay close to the “good for humanity” mission to steer clear from political and societal backlashes for powering machine-driven workforces.
