Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT) has appointed Dr. Ben Bernanke, a Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution and former Chair of the Federal Reserve, as its newest member. He joins an independent body dedicated to holding Anthropic accountable to its mission of responsibly developing advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.
Bernanke served as head of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014, guiding the central bank through the 2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent recovery. Prior to his government service, he spent over two decades as an academic economist, primarily at Princeton, where he led the economics department and conducted extensive research on the Great Depression and the role of banks in financial crises. This body of work earned him the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
In a statement, Dr. Bernanke noted that the potential of artificial intelligence is immense, as is the range of possible outcomes. How that potential unfolds will depend partly on the institutions built around it. He described Anthropic's governance structure as a unique effort to ensure that AI's long-run benefits for humanity significantly outweigh the risks, and expressed his honor at the opportunity to contribute to this mission.
Daniela Amodei, Co-Founder and President of Anthropic, remarked that AI may produce the most significant economic effects of any technology in modern history, and that Anthropic bears a dual responsibility to understand and act on those effects. She highlighted Bernanke's career trajectory-from studying how economies respond to disruptive events to helping steer the world's largest economy through one-and said his judgment would strengthen Anthropic's ability to anticipate and respond to AI's impact on workforces and economies globally.
Anthropic is structured as a Public Benefit Corporation, meaning the company was established to balance commercial success with generating social and public good. The LTBT exists to help the company responsibly maintain that balance over the long term, serving as a check on how Anthropic develops and deploys AI. Trustees are selected for their expertise across a broad range of fields and are independent of the company's management and investors-they hold no equity in Anthropic, do not share in its profits, and are compensated only for their time and service. New Trustees are chosen by existing members in consultation with the company.
Neil Buddy Shah, Chair of the LTBT, stated that the institutions surrounding this technology will matter as much as the technology itself. He pointed to Bernanke's eight years leading the Federal Reserve and his guidance of the country through the worst financial crisis in nearly a century as demonstrations of the expertise, independence, and sound judgment the Trust seeks in its members.
The LTBT holds the authority to appoint members to Anthropic's board. The Trustees advise the board and Anthropic's leadership on critical decisions, particularly those involving potential risks and societal impacts of AI. Bernanke's appointment brings expertise to one of the questions Anthropic studies most closely: how AI is transforming the economy. He will contribute his insight to Anthropic's economic research, along with other areas of the company's work.
Bernanke joins Neil Buddy Shah, Richard Fontaine, and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar on the LTBT. Together, their collective experience spans global health, national security, law, policy, and economics.