The LTBT, whose members have no equity in the company, currently elects one out of the board’s five members. But that number will rise to two out of five this July, and then to three out of five this November.
This is encouraging and makes me not care anymore about seeing the “milestones.” (And it explains why OP/investors/whoever didn’t bother to replace Luke.) My concerns about investors’ power over the Trust remain.
Also:
The LTBT’s first five members were picked by Anthropic’s executives for their expertise in three fields that the company’s co-founders felt were important to its mission: AI safety, national security, and social enterprise. Among those selected were Jason Matheny, CEO of the RAND corporation, Kanika Bahl, CEO of development nonprofit Evidence Action, and AI safety researcher Paul Christiano. [The other two were Neil Buddy Shah of the Clinton Health Access Initiative and formerly GiveWell and Zach Robinson of CEA and EV] (Christiano resigned from the LTBT prior to taking a new role in April leading the U.S. government’s new AI Safety Institute, he said in an email. His seat has yet to be filled.)
From this we can infer that the other four Trustees remain on the Trust, which is weak good news. [Edit: nope, Matheny left months ago due to potential (appearance of) conflict of interest. It’s odd that this article doesn’t mention that. As of May 31, Christiano and Matheny have not yet been replaced. It is maybe quite concerning if they—the two AI safety experts—are gone and not replaced by AI safety experts, and the Trust is putting non-AI-safety people on the board. Also I’m disappointed that Anthropic didn’t cause me to know this before.]
Also:
Amazon and Google, he says, do not own voting shares in Anthropic, meaning they cannot elect board members and their votes would not be counted in any supermajority required to rewrite the rules governing the LTBT. (Holders of Anthropic’s Series B stock, much of which was initially bought by the defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX, also do not have voting rights, Israel says.)
Google and Amazon each own less than 15% of Anthropic, according to a person familiar with the matter.
So then the question is: who does own voting shares; how are voting shares distributed? and how can this change in the future?
(Also we just got twomore examples of Anthropic taking credit for the Trust, and one of the articles even incorrectly says “power ultimately lies with a small, unaccountable group.”)
Update:
This is encouraging and makes me not care anymore about seeing the “milestones.” (And it explains why OP/investors/whoever didn’t bother to replace Luke.) My concerns about investors’ power over the Trust remain.
Also:
From this we can infer that the other four Trustees remain on the Trust, which is weak good news. [Edit: nope, Matheny left months ago due to potential (appearance of) conflict of interest. It’s odd that this article doesn’t mention that. As of May 31, Christiano and Matheny have not yet been replaced. It is maybe quite concerning if they—the two AI safety experts—are gone and not replaced by AI safety experts, and the Trust is putting non-AI-safety people on the board. Also I’m disappointed that Anthropic didn’t cause me to know this before.]
Also:
So then the question is: who does own voting shares; how are voting shares distributed? and how can this change in the future?
(Also we just got two more examples of Anthropic taking credit for the Trust, and one of the articles even incorrectly says “power ultimately lies with a small, unaccountable group.”)