Anthropic pledges five percent of itself to a public benefit fund, and Musk answers with a SpaceX share for every American child

Two of the largest fortunes being built in artificial intelligence were offered, in part, to the public this weekend. Neither offer has been carried out yet, and the distance between the two designs is the story.

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, announced the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund: at least five percent of the company’s shares set aside for public benefit, with the share rising as the company’s value grows. The pledge is worth about 48 billion dollars at the last reported valuation, as of October 19. The company says its cofounders have already pledged to donate 80 percent of their equity, and that about half its employees are donating part of theirs through a matching program the company has run since its founding. Anthropic has not yet published the fund’s governance structure or how it will be taxed and disclosed, and it says those details will come in the following months, ahead of a possible stock market debut as early as November. The company also used the weekend to press its proposed framework for binding rules on the most powerful AI models, which would let the government block a model release that posed a foreseeable and imminent risk of mass harm, through a Commerce Department process and a federal court order.

Musk responded on X within hours, first with a recommendation: give the shares directly to the public, which is what he would do. Early on Monday he made it a pledge. “Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many,” he wrote. There are roughly 72 million children in the country. At about 146 dollars a share, the gift comes to roughly ten and a half billion dollars, a little over one percent of the 6.42 billion SpaceX shares over which Musk holds voting power and about one percent of a fortune estimated at roughly 900 billion dollars, as of October 19. He gave no eligibility rules and no mechanism. One route exists on paper: the Treasury Department has recently allowed companies and charities to donate individual company shares into Trump Accounts, the tax advantaged savings accounts for children, with donated stock generally held for five years, and Musk’s replies suggested that is the channel he has in mind.

Both pledges arrive while the AI industry is fighting a public argument about data centers, power and who gets rich. They are pledges, not transfers. Anthropic’s fund has no published governance yet and Musk’s gift has no published terms, and what either one is worth on delivery depends on valuations that move. Nothing in either announcement is investment advice, and no share has changed hands yet.