Investing in the public benefit | Hacker News Reader

Investing in the public benefit

anthropic.com

58 pointssurprisetalk47 comments

Anthropic has a large in-house PR machine (80 people). Main functions are "attention flooding", well-resourced news-blitz strategy.

why cant the robot do it?

Anthropic has a PR machine? Doesn’t seem it’s working very well.

There's a scene in Wolf of Wall street where the main character is interviewed for a newspaper article about the trading firm he runs. The newspaper article comes out and it's very damaging. The very next scene, however, is their office being inundated with applicants to work there. It's working exceedingly well, you're just not the target market.

They make it to the frontpage of every major newspaper multiple times a week. I'd say that they are doing exceptionally well.

It is hard to take the "Public Benefit" narrative from Ant seriously. If developing technology in the name of public benefit was truly the mission, taking the company public would have been immediately shot down- you cannot trick yourself into believing that any of these mission values will be allowed to operate under public shareholders for very long, especially due to the massive dilution Ant has seen in the last few years.

Given OpenAI already did its mask-off moment with their un-nonprofiting, which did not appear to damage them much after the media cycle blew over, I am a bit surprised Anthropic is deciding to continue with this lip service.

The greatest public benefit you could provide would be to open source your models.

This was really loud in my mind reading this post. It seems so obvious!

> It is common practice for tech companies to offer escalating compensation awards to their executives. We are instead directing that equity to the public benefit.

Dario Amodei's 2025 total comp is reported to have been $18m.

His sister, Daniela Amodei's was $16.4m.

For reference, Sundar Pichai's reported comp in 2025 was $10.5m.

What's your source?

Sundar Pichai was given a $692M pay package this year (incentive-linked over three years)

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/07/google-just-gave-sundar-pi...

This article:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/alphabet-google-c...

It shows his comp over a number of years, including these enormous 3 year packages that are a ceiling, not a guarantee.

Picked 2025 specifically instead of the 2022 three year package or the 2026 three year package, to make it more comparable to what you might expect from a pre-IPO company like Anthropic; otherwise it would be too much apples and oranges.

> Sundar Pichai has an estimated net worth of at least $1.0 billion*, as of Oct. 14, 2026. They own 2.2 million shares of GOOGL stock. They have sold 1.4 million shares of GOOGL stock since 2021, for an estimated $231.4 million.

Anthropic is pre IPO, so this is comparing apples to oranges.

In 2022, Sundar Pichai’s reported total compensation was about $226 million.

I'm not sure why you left that out?

And his potential pay for the next 3 years is in that range as well. Was 2025 specifically a cherry-picked off year for him? Or is the $10.5m simply false?

> Was 2025 specifically a cherry-picked off year for him? Or is the $10.5m simply false?

Yes, to make it more comparable to what you might expect from a pre-IPO company like Anthropic; otherwise it would be apples and oranges.

Read https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/alphabet-google-c... which gives you a sense of how and why it varies. Know also that the $692m number is a ceiling, not a guarantee.

Is the $18m comp package based on secondary market valuations for stock or what? Seems like you'd want to be at least a little careful comparing public stock comp to private.

According to the company's confidential IPO S-1 prospectus filing revealed in October 2026 that Reuters reported on. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/anthropics-ipo-pros...

I haven't seen the confidential prospectus and haven't read reports on whether it is based on secondary market value, but it is mostly stock. His base salary was only $1.4m in 2025, but doubled in 2026.

Is this not a bit low for a company with a $1.5T-$2T market cap and the levels of revenue that Anthropic has? I mean compared to market cap / revenue peers, not compared to employees or in absolute terms.

>We’re establishing the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund as a wholly-owned LLC—rather than a 501(c)(3) or other format—to give adjustability between different forms of giving.

A corporation so big it starts doing the job of the collective / state - interesting, whos job are they taking here? Why not pay taxes and let us, the people decide how to use it instead?

> Why not pay taxes and let us, the people decide how to use it instead?

Maybe because the current administration has no interest in doing this and Anthropic doesn't want to wait for this cluster-f of a situation to sort itself out. Even if the current admin was for progressive taxation it might take them years to sort through all the bureaucracy to use this money effectively which might be much too late.

But in theory I think you're right.

This is for PR. They need to be able to generate more revenue than they take from economically-redundant humans in order to make them whole. This is certainly possible, but it's going to take government action; AI companies are never going to return that much money left to their own devices.

Don Fanucci was publicly donating a lot of money in The Godfather.

The cyberpunk future awaits us! All hail the corpo owning class. I can't wait to move to the company town, those always work out well.

Straight out of Snowcrash.

Wenn das Geld im Kasten klingt, die Seele aus dem Fegfeuer springt.

I had to translate it.

> As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.

It's quite poetic. And tragically true.

Who is today's Martin Luther, for people laundering their bad deeds?

I'm unclear what you are asking or getting at, so I'm not sure how to reply, but...

I will say that Michael Sandel and Daron Acemoglu are two speakers and teachers (and friends of each other) that have some very interesting things to say about our current situations, how we got here, how we move beyond.

Just more self-serving hokum. If they really wanted to serve the public benefit they would just shut themselves down.

Super cool! 5% of $1.5T is $75B (and 7% of $2.25T is $156B). When added to the ~15% already pledged by founders and employees, that's roughly $300B going to charity/public benefit, which roughly matches the OpenAI Foundation. Of course you can ask questions like why this amount or why this way, but I for one think it's fantastic for rich developers of new technology to share their surplus with the world. I hope their stockholders approve the donation.

> going to charity/public benefit

Is it? Idk about previously committed money, but this sounds like it's going to an LLC that is owned and controlled by anthropic.

Afaik there's no formal constraint preventing them from spending 100% of this money on cool sports cars for anthropic execs. Even if it was committed to being spent on the "public good", that's the public good as decided by anthropic, not the public.

Or spend it on compute "for the good of the public" for some more fun circular financing.

Sure, there will always be some trust and interpretation involved. I'm sure whatever they spend it on will never satisfy everyone. But I'd rather criticize actual dishonesty and theft, not the specter of its potential. If they spend the money on cars for execs, I assume they'd open themselves up to lawsuits, hurt their image, and damage employee morale. Voting for an exec comp increase would be far less risky than fraud. I feel confident this announcement is genuine, but of course none of us can read minds.

I mean, is this different from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or the Jeffery Epstein Foundation? A relatively transparent use of money to buy influence and goodwill. Every person who is beholden to their money is now unable to freely speak out against them, every person who sees their name next to good sounding things thinks well of them. Jobs for friends, quid pro quo for politicians, etc.

You can see from their own past actions and all of human history that this is a ploy to launder their image. If you can't, then you are willfully ignorant. No company is ever going to do anything for the public good. Profit is the only motive for a capitalist.

Your theory is that this is self-interested PR. How does your theory explain why Anthropic is doing this, but so many other companies aren’t? If all company actions were self-interested, then wouldn’t you expect this to be a common move? Explaining why this is so uncommon requires either uncommon motive or uncommon circumstance. The theory that I find more explanatory is that the founders feel some degree of altruism and wish to exert their control over their company to effect their desired change in the world, especially before they go public and face greater scrutiny.

Because those other companies have different PR firms. Different people make different choices. It's not that hard to figure out the answer to your question. Lots of other companies are doing very similar things.

I don't believe any tech founders actually give a crap about anyone outside their circle. They care about LOOKING like they care to launder their image so they can keep raking in the money.

If they actually wanted to help people, they would stop doing things that wreck the economy for everyone else.

That's a drop in the bucket and it will mostly be a make work program for their extended network of friends and family, like most charities.

feels like a prenup for government bailout

FTX Future Fund 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Will you launch a public benefit program that help unemployed software engineers become coal miners?

Please just fuck off with your next scam on a beige background.

It feels disingenuous when a company attaches to market valuation the amount of public good they do. By that logic, they could say: "We didn't do well in the market, so we're not investing as much in making the world a better place."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50141429

A 2% for every 50% increase is just insulting.

It might have made sense when they were valued at <100B.

At current 2T valuation it's basically saying "we'll throw some crumbs to the public if we control the world's economy".

At the very minimum the 2% should have doubled every time.

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