Who’s really in charge at Anthropic after the IPO?

Anthropic says it was founded in 2021 to keep humanity in control of AI and to make long-term gains from it. If it goes public, that mission-first talk collides with a governance setup that gives ordinary shareholders very little leverage over the company’s biggest decisions.

The company is a public benefit corporation, so its board can prioritize AI safety alongside profit without treating shareholder value as the only goal. That board is chaired by president Daniela Amodei and includes CEO Dario Amodei, Reed Hastings, Christopher Liddell, Vas Narasimhan, and Yasmin Razavi. One seat is still open.

Then there’s the Long Term Benefit Trust, a separate body built to keep Anthropic pointed at its mission. It can elect and remove a majority of the board’s Class T directors, and its members include Neil Shah, Ben Bernanke, Richard Fontaine, and Christopher Stubbs. There’s also one vacancy there, and the current members get to pick who fills it.

The founders have their own control block too. Anthropic’s seven founders together hold a special class of stock that gives a majority of them 50.1% of shareholder voting power, enough to elect three board members. And if the trust tries to nominate or remove a certain kind of director, the board’s nominating committee can block it and send the fight to employees instead.

That makes Anthropic look less like a normal public company and more like a three-way tug of war with a fourth referee in the building. The setup could keep the company stubbornly mission-driven, but it also means the people buying stock may end up financing a company they mostly can’t steer. Ten years after the IPO, or sooner if fewer than three founders remain, the founders’ control ends. After that, the trust can linger until 85% of common shareholders vote it out, or it steps down with board approval.