Anthropic adds Ben Bernanke to the Long-Term Benefit Trust
Bernanke, who chaired the Fed through the 2008 financial crisis, becomes the fourth trustee of a body that holds no equity but can appoint Anthropic board members.
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Anthropic announced that Ben Bernanke, who chaired the US Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014 and shared the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, had joined its Long-Term Benefit Trust. The Trust is an independent governance body whose members hold no equity in the company and do not profit from it; its role is to advise Anthropic’s leadership on decisions bearing on AI risk and societal impact, and it holds the power to appoint members of the company’s board.
Bernanke joins Neil Buddy Shah, the Trust’s chair, along with Richard Fontaine and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, bringing the body’s collective background in global health, national security, law, policy and now macroeconomics. Anthropic said Bernanke’s experience steering the Fed’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, and his subsequent research on economic disruption, positioned him to help the company anticipate AI’s effects on labour markets and the wider economy. Bernanke said in the announcement that “the institutions we build around [AI] will determine how its potential plays out.”
The appointment extended a pattern of Anthropic recruiting figures with government and macroeconomic-policy backgrounds, rather than AI researchers, onto its governance and oversight bodies.