Investing in the public benefit
anthropic.com32 points by surprisetalk 2 hours ago
32 points by surprisetalk 2 hours ago
Anthropic has a large in-house PR machine (80 people). Main functions are "attention flooding", well-resourced news-blitz strategy.
Anthropic has a PR machine? Doesn’t seem it’s working very well.
There's a scene in Wolf of Wall street where the main character is interviewed for a newspaper article about the trading firm he runs. The newspaper article comes out and it's very damaging. The very next scene, however, is their office being inundated with applicants to work there. It's working exceedingly well, you're just not the target market.
They make it to the frontpage of every major newspaper multiple times a week. I'd say that they are doing exceptionally well.
> It is common practice for tech companies to offer escalating compensation awards to their executives. We are instead directing that equity to the public benefit.
Dario Amodei's 2025 total comp is reported to have been $18m.
His sister, Daniela Amodei's was $16.4m.
For reference, Sundar Pichai's reported comp in 2025 was $10.5m.
Is the $18m comp package based on secondary market valuations for stock or what? Seems like you'd want to be at least a little careful comparing public stock comp to private.
According to the company's confidential IPO S-1 prospectus filing revealed in October 2026 that Reuters reported on. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/anthropics-ipo-pros...
I haven't seen the confidential prospectus and haven't read reports on whether it is based on secondary market value, but it is mostly stock. His base salary was only $1.4m in 2025, but doubled in 2026.
> Sundar Pichai has an estimated net worth of at least $1.0 billion*, as of Oct. 14, 2026. They own 2.2 million shares of GOOGL stock. They have sold 1.4 million shares of GOOGL stock since 2021, for an estimated $231.4 million.
Anthropic is pre IPO, so this is comparing apples to oranges.
In 2022, Sundar Pichai’s reported total compensation was about $226 million.
I'm not sure why you left that out?
And his potential pay for the next 3 years is in that range as well. Was 2025 specifically a cherry-picked off year for him? Or is the $10.5m simply false?
Is this not a bit low for a company with a $1.5T-$2T market cap and the levels of revenue that Anthropic has? I mean compared to market cap / revenue peers, not compared to employees or in absolute terms.
The greatest public benefit you could provide would be to open source your models.
A corporation so big it starts doing the job of the collective / state - interesting, whos job are they taking here? Why not pay taxes and let us, the people decide how to use it instead?
> Why not pay taxes and let us, the people decide how to use it instead?
Maybe because the current administration has no interest in doing this and Anthropic doesn't want to wait for this cluster-f of a situation to sort itself out. Even if the current admin was for progressive taxation it might take them years to sort through all the bureaucracy to use this money effectively which might be much too late.
But in theory I think you're right.
This is for PR. They need to be able to generate more revenue than they take from economically-redundant humans in order to make them whole. This is certainly possible, but it's going to take government action; AI companies are never going to return that much money left to their own devices.
The cyberpunk future awaits us! All hail the corpo owning class. I can't wait to move to the company town, those always work out well.
>We’re establishing the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund as a wholly-owned LLC—rather than a 501(c)(3) or other format—to give adjustability between different forms of giving.
Wenn das Geld im Kasten klingt, die Seele aus dem Fegfeuer springt.
I had to translate it.
> As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.
It's quite poetic. And tragically true.
"anthropic bad because some reason"
This is a reference to indulgence sales by the Catholic Church, which bought you a clear conscience.
Apparently it is lost on an Anthropic bot.
It feels disingenuous when a company attaches to market valuation the amount of public good they do. By that logic, they could say: "We didn't do well in the market, so we're not investing as much in making the world a better place."
Super cool! 5% of $1.5T is $75B (and 7% of $2.25T is $156B). When added to the ~15% already pledged by founders and employees, that's roughly $300B going to charity/public benefit, which roughly matches the OpenAI Foundation. Of course you can ask questions like why this amount or why this way, but I for one think it's fantastic for rich developers of new technology to share their surplus with the world. I hope their stockholders approve the donation.
> going to charity/public benefit
Is it? Idk about previously committed money, but this sounds like it's going to an LLC that is owned and controlled by anthropic.
Afaik there's no formal constraint preventing them from spending 100% of this money on cool sports cars for anthropic execs. Even if it was committed to being spent on the "public good", that's the public good as decided by anthropic, not the public.
Sure, there will always be some trust and interpretation involved. I'm sure whatever they spend it on will never satisfy everyone. But I'd rather criticize actual dishonesty and theft, not the specter of its potential. If they spend the money on cars for execs, I assume they'd open themselves up to lawsuits, hurt their image, and damage employee morale. Voting for an exec comp increase would be far less risky than fraud. I feel confident this announcement is genuine, but of course none of us can read minds.
That's a drop in the bucket and it will mostly be a make work program for their extended network of friends and family, like most charities.
Just more self-serving hokum. If they really wanted to serve the public benefit they would just shut themselves down.
Will you launch a public benefit program that help unemployed software engineers become coal miners?
Please just fuck off with your next scam on a beige background.
FTX Future Fund 2: Electric Boogaloo.
A 2% for every 50% increase is just insulting.
It might have made sense when they were valued at <100B.
At current 2T valuation it's basically saying "we'll throw some crumbs to the public if we control the world's economy".
At the very minimum the 2% should have doubled every time.