Anthropic appoints Reed Hastings to its board of directors

Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust — the body of independent trustees empowered under the company’s governance structure to elect a portion of its board — appointed Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder and chairman, to Anthropic’s board of directors. Hastings had stepped down as Netflix’s chief executive in 2023 after leading the company for more than 25 years, and had previously served on the boards of Facebook, Microsoft and Bloomberg.

Buddy Shah, chair of the Trust, said Hastings’s leadership experience and philanthropic record made him well suited to the role. Hastings said he wanted “to help humanity progress.” He had recently given $50 million to Bowdoin College to fund a research initiative on AI and humanity, examining the technology’s effects on work, relationships and education.

The appointment was a routine governance move rather than a strategic pivot, but it illustrated the mechanism distinctive to Anthropic’s structure: board seats reserved for trustees to fill independently of the company’s commercial shareholders, intended to keep some measure of outside oversight over a fast-scaling frontier lab.