Anthropic Gives 5% of Itself to the Public. Musk Answers by Giving Away SpaceX Shares

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, >said Sunday it will commit 5% of its shares to a new Public Benefit Fund. On Monday, Elon Musk answered by promising one SpaceX share to every child in the United States next year. “The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund will have increased flexibility and scale, enabling us to pursue our mission in new ways: for example, we might explore large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations,” Anthropic said. The company has already committed $200 million to studying that. Americans are uneasy about how fast AI is moving: an AP-NORC poll in late September found that 64% of U.S. adults say the technology is developing too fast, and 8% say too slow. Anthropic is preparing an IPO, meaning it would sell its shares to the public on the stock market, as soon as November at a reported valuation of around $2 trillion. At that price, 5% of the company would be worth about $100 billion on paper, though that is the value of the shares, not cash sitting in an account. The fund is set up as a wholly owned LLC rather than a nonprofit, which Anthropic says gives it room to switch between types of giving. The board can add another 2% of shares each time the company's value rises 50% above a baseline that has not been disclosed, and none of the fund's equity can be used for lobbying or political donations. The co-founders' pledge to donate 80% of their equity and a matching program for employee donations, and Anthropic says roughly 20% of its shares will be dedicated to the public good. The company has not said how the fund will be taxed or what it will disclose publicly, as a traditional charity must. Musk, never one to leave the spotlight to someone else, >pushed for Universal High Income (as opposed to Universal Basic Income) writing on X that he will give one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America. "This will be the first of many," he added. His first reply to Anthropic, recommending "giving the shares directly to the public" instead of routing them through a fund, came Sunday night, and the pledge for kids followed early Monday, less than a day after Anthropic's announcement. Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2026 With roughly 72 million children in the country, the pledge comes to about $10.5 billion at SpaceX's price of roughly $147 a share. That is just over 1% of the 6.42 billion shares Musk held as of June 30, p