Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, said Sunday it will commit 5% of its shares to a new Public Benefit Fund. On Monday, Elon Musk answered by promising one SpaceX share to every child in the United States next year.
“The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund will have increased flexibility and scale, enabling us to pursue our mission in new ways: for example, we might explore large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations,” Anthropic said. The company has already committed $200 million to studying that.
Americans are uneasy about how fast AI is moving: an AP-NORC poll in late September found that 64% of U.S. adults say the technology is developing too fast, and 8% say too slow.
Anthropic is preparing an IPO, meaning it would sell its shares to the public on the stock market, as soon as November at a reported valuation of around $2 trillion. At that price, 5% of the company would be worth about $100 billion on paper, though that is the value of the shares, not cash sitting in an account.
The fund is set up as a wholly owned LLC rather than a nonprofit, which Anthropic says gives it room to switch between types of giving. The board can add another 2% of shares each time the company's value rises 50% above a baseline that has not been disclosed, and none of the fund's equity can be used for lobbying or political donations.
The co-founders' pledge to donate 80% of their equity and a matching program for employee donations, and Anthropic says roughly 20% of its shares will be dedicated to the public good. The company has not said how the fund will be taxed or what it will disclose publicly, as a traditional charity must.
Musk, never one to leave the spotlight to someone else, pushed for Universal High Income (as opposed to Universal Basic Income) writing on X that he will give one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America. "This will be the first of many," he added.
His first reply to Anthropic, recommending "giving the shares directly to the public" instead of routing them through a fund, came Sunday night, and the pledge for kids followed early Monday, less than a day after Anthropic's announcement.
With roughly 72 million children in the country, the pledge comes to about $10.5 billion at SpaceX's price of roughly $147 a share. That is just over 1% of the 6.42 billion shares Musk held as of June 30, per an SEC filing, and about the same slice of a fortune estimated at $908.5 billion that has crossed $1 trillion several times this year.
The Treasury Department recently let companies and charities donate individual company shares to Trump Accounts, tax-advantaged savings accounts for children, with donated stock generally held for five years. This is likely the option Musk is going for instead of Anthropic’s path of creating a fund, which he more or less confirmed in a reply post on X.
The Anthropic giveaway comes from a company whose CEO wrote in January that "we are considerably closer to real danger in 2026" and which is known to preach the gospel of AI doomerism while maxing out accelerationism, releasing the most powerful AI models on the market.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman accused Anthropic in April of using fear-based marketing to promote Claude Mythos, and Anthropic is now giving away a slice of itself ahead of a stock market debut.
Two days before the fund, Anthropic had quietly presented lawmakers with its own draft AI safety bill. It would let the government block the release of a model posing a foreseeable, imminent risk of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people or causing over $1 billion in damage, through a bioweapon, an AI slipping beyond human control, or a cyberattack.
A block would have to run through the Commerce Department and a federal court order, and developers would publish safety frameworks and transparency reports for new models. Anthropic says the bill reflects its Advanced AI Framework, promoted to lawmakers since June, the month CEO Dario Amodei called for binding rules on frontier models, meaning the most powerful AI systems.
Anthropic critics include investor and former White House AI czar David Sacks, who responded to the company’s pledge with his own post on X: “You’ve put 20% of your equity in an LCC. Whether it serves the public good remains to be seen.”
Anthropic says it will release the fund's governance structure and valuation thresholds in the coming months, and its IPO could come as early as November.
