Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Anthropic’s seven billionaire co-founders are set to gain collective control over one of the world’s biggest companies following its blockbuster listing, testing whether shared beliefs and personal bonds can withstand the pressures of the public market.**** The AI lab issued its IPO prospectus on Monday, revealing that seven executives — chief executive Dario Amodei and president Daniela Amodei, alongside Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Christopher Olah — will together gain a special class of stock that grants them 50.1 per cent of the voting power. The move means ordinary shareholders will have virtually no control over Anthropic’s decisions.
Instead, investors must bet on a group that is described as “stewards of our mission” in the S-1 prospectus. The document pointed to the “uncommon” retention of all seven — a subtle critique of OpenAI, Anthropic’s rival where the majority of co-founders have left. Anthropic’s seven co-founders were colleagues at OpenAI© Gabby Jones/Bloomberg “The Anthropic founding team has an incredibly unified vision and culture, which is something that is pretty rare among frontier AI labs,” said Jenny Xiao, former OpenAI researcher and partner at Leonis Capital.
All seven have pledged to donate 80 per cent of their wealth to charity. Anthropic’s seven co-founders were colleagues at OpenAI until December 2020, when they quit to start their own lab. A shared belief spurred them on: AI systems were scaling rapidly, and rolling them out required a more responsible path.
He gathered the seven to split off to form their own organisation. The idea was first suggested by Kaplan, a friend from graduate school, according to people familiar with the matter. Amodei had previously worked with Brown and Olah at Google.
Jared Kaplan’s early work at OpenAI has shaped the AI sector’s current approach to developing models© Chris J Ratcliffe/Bloomberg Kaplan’s early work at OpenAI included research with McCandlish and Amodei on“scaling laws”, or how AI model capabilities increase with data and computing power. This research has shaped the AI sector’s current approach to developing models. Daniela Amodei, who worked on AI safety and policy at OpenAI, and Clark, a former Bloomberg journalist who worked on OpenAI’s policy and communications, also moved to start Anthropic.
The co-founders questioned whether to form a company at all, or whether to form an organisation styled on Cern, the renowned Swiss physics centre, according to people familiar with the matter. Many within the group expressed doubts about creating a for-profit venture, they added. The Anthropic Builder Summit in Bengaluru, India, in February.
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