Anthropic started as a public benefit corporation, a better governance choice than OpenAI's nonprofit shell. But to raise money and build products, it had to become a capabilities lab too, not just an alignment lab. Market forces, not founder ideals, ultimately shape where the company goes.
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congrats to Anthropic on having a less pathological IPO governance story than OpenAI. Oh my God. And having the wisdom to start as a public benefit corporation rather than a nonprofit as a shell for eventually a for-profit, and then the mix-up and litigation surrounding that. But I also think this notion of founder control, the ones entrusted to safeguard the future light cone of humanity, I think this is wildly over-romanticised. I think the moment When Anthropic was exodused from OpenAI and started out as an alignment lab and then rapidly discovered, if you want to do AI alignment, you have to raise money. Oh, to raise money, you have to generate revenue. Oh, to generate revenue, you have to actually have something that people want to buy. Oh, to have something that people want to buy, you have to have AI capabilities. So Anthropic discovered relatively early on in their existence that if they wanted to be an alignment lab, they had to be a capabilities lab as well. The moment that happened, they arguably probably lost any sort of fulsome control over the future Lightcone that they might have otherwise had. They are very much an economic actor at this point embedded in the market. And I think long-term benefit trusts and public benefit corporations, which for the record, I'm a huge fan of, I think these are an element of control, but they're not the whole story. The market wants to send capital to entities that can productively employ them to generate more capital. And that means that ultimately the market will have an enormous say regardless of how Anthropic IP videos in their ultimate story.
