“Maybe Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust is powerless” by Zach Stein-Perlman

Crossposted from AI Lab Watch. Subscribe on Substack.

Introduction.

Anthropic has an unconventional governance mechanism: an independent "Long-Term Benefit Trust" elects some of its board. Anthropic sometimes emphasizes that the Trust is an experiment, but mostly points to it to argue that Anthropic will be able to promote safety and benefit-sharing over profit.[1]

But the Trust's details have not been published and some information Anthropic has shared is concerning. In particular, Anthropic's stockholders can apparently overrule, modify, or abrogate the Trust, and the details are unclear.

Anthropic has not publicly demonstrated that the Trust would be able to actually do anything that stockholders don't like.

The facts

There are three sources of public information on the Trust:

• The Long-Term Benefit Trust (Anthropic 2023)
• Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust (Morley et al. 2023)
• The $1 billion gamble to ensure AI doesn't destroy humanity (Vox: Matthews 2023)

They say there's [...]

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Outline:

(00:53) The facts

(02:51) Conclusion

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
May 27th, 2024

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JARcd9wKraDeuaFu5/maybe-anthropic-s-long-term-benefit-trust-is-powerless

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.