Anthropic puts 5% of its shares into a public fund

Anthropic is setting up the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a wholly owned company that will hold 5 percent of its shares, subject to stockholder approval. The board can add 2 percent more for each 50 percent rise in Anthropic's value above a baseline it has not yet published. Anthropic says the fund could make large donations to nonprofits or pay money directly to specific groups, and names the labor-market effects of AI as one area it may take on. The fund's equity will not be used for lobbying or political giving. It has not said who will decide how the money is spent, and promises structure and governance details in the coming months. Counting the co-founders' pledge to give away 80 percent of their own equity and an employee donation match, Anthropic says about a fifth of the company is now set aside for public benefit. The move lands while Anthropic prepares its stock market listing.

Speaking on October 17 at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said one of the company's internal models projects that AI could raise US economic output by nearly 50 percent by 2030, to about 44 trillion dollars from roughly 30 trillion now. He said the forecast assumes the technology keeps improving and would need new industries and inventions to come true. Clark paired it with a warning: he told policymakers they have a limited window to agree on what he called "unusual and serious rules" for AI, and said faster progress would bring great wealth alongside great peril. The fund Anthropic announced the next day is its own answer to who shares in that wealth.

Microsoft has ended its involvement in Nscale's planned AI data center in Loughton, Essex, which was billed as the largest in Britain, the BBC reported. Microsoft had said only in September that part of its 30 billion dollar UK investment would pay for a supercomputer there. The site was due to be connected to the power grid by the end of 2026, but Nscale has been told that will not happen until the 2030s, according to the Telegraph. Nscale says it still plans to build the 2 billion pound project, is looking at other power sources, and keeps working with Microsoft in Norway, Portugal and the United States. Microsoft declined to comment. The setback comes as Nscale prepares its own stock market listing in New York.

Character.AI's bankruptcy sale has its first bid for the people behind it. Disney has agreed to offer jobs to at least 60 of the chatbot startup's employees, a majority of its workforce, and the vast majority have accepted, according to a court filing first reported by Bloomberg and covered by TechCrunch. The offers carry roughly 60 million dollars a year in pay. The arrangement is a stalking-horse bid, so another buyer could still top it, and it comes on top of Disney's 20 million dollar offer for a license to some of Character.AI's technology. Character.AI's bankruptcy filing blamed high costs and the legal and regulatory exposure from lawsuits and state investigations over child safety.

With federal self-driving rules still stalled in Congress, cities and states are writing their own, The Verge's Andrew Hawkins reports. Minneapolis is weighing a rule that would require a human monitor in every autonomous vehicle, San Diego's council wants Waymo kept away from its airport, and Austin firefighters want emergency towing and operator-contact rules for Tesla's Cybercab, which has no steering wheel. The pushback is no longer partisan: Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Iowa are among the states considering tighter limits. On October 18, The Verge reported that Philadelphia police had arrested Carolyn Marvin for disorderly conduct after she refused to stop blocking an Uber delivery robot, which she said was taking delivery workers' jobs.

MIT researchers led by Ju Li and Elsa Olivetti built a model that learns from both the three-dimensional atomic structure of crystals and written descriptions of what they are made of, how they behave and what they are used for. Ask it in plain language for a material with a given property, and it returns candidate crystals. In a test on solid electrolytes for lithium batteries, its top picks included materials other researchers had already flagged as promising, and it beat text-only models at finding good designs. The work is published in Nature Communications. MIT's announcement describes no newly made material yet, so for now this is a search tool, not a discovery.