Dr. Christopher Stubbs is an experimental physicist and a former Dean of Science at Harvard University. He has become a member of Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust. He brings decades of scientific experience in observational cosmology and precision measurement. He has also advised the US government on national security and arms control.
Stubbs said he was honored to join the Trust and to help the company fulfill its public benefit mission. He said he uses AI tools in his research every day and sees what they make possible. As an educator, he has faced some of the hard questions they raise. As a grandfather, he wants to help make sure AI is built and used for humanity's long-term benefit.
Stubbs holds the Samuel C. Moncher Professorship of Physics and of Astronomy at Harvard, and he was Dean of Science there from 2018 to 2024. In 1998 he was part of the High-Z Supernova Search Team, which discovered that the universe's expansion is accelerating. The team later received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for this work. He was also the first project scientist for what is now the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The observatory began a 10-year survey of the southern sky in June, and one of its goals is to study the accelerating expansion he helped uncover.
More recently, he has written about keeping AI-assisted research reproducible when models may give different answers to the same question. He is also a member of JASON, an independent group of scientists that has advised the US government on defense and technology since 1960.
Daniela Amodei, Co-founder and President of Anthropic, said that when Stubbs and his team found the universe expanding at an unexpected rate, they followed the data even though it contradicted the field's prevailing view. She said that as AI begins to transform how science is done, his intellectual honesty, rigor and commitment to truth are the values Anthropic wants to shape the technology's future. She added that she is grateful he is bringing his expertise to the Trust.
Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation, so it is structured to balance commercial growth with its public benefit purpose. The Trust helps Anthropic maintain that balance over the long term. It can appoint a majority of Anthropic's board. Trustees also advise the board and Anthropic's leadership on critical decisions, especially those involving the risks and societal impacts of AI.
This week Anthropic published its first Public Benefit Report. It is a public account of how Anthropic is working toward its charter and where it is falling short. The Trustees helped define the five charter pillars against which the report measures Anthropic. The report ends with their assessment of Anthropic's progress so far. Subject to stockholder approval, Anthropic has also committed to setting aside a portion of its shares for the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund. This new entity is structured so that its stake grows as the company grows.
Neil Buddy Shah, Chair of the Long-Term Benefit Trust, said that helping the world build powerful AI safely and making sure it meaningfully improves people's lives both depend on a deep understanding of science and on leading with integrity. He noted that Stubbs has worked on some of science's hardest problems. He has also consistently led large, complex, collaborative scientific efforts with integrity across academia, government and the national laboratories. Shah said this will be of great value as the Trust supports Anthropic in developing AI for humanity's long-term benefit.
Stubbs is the Trust's first physicist. He joins Shah, national security expert Richard Fontaine and former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke. Trustees are independent of the company's management and investors.