Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman who guided America's central bank through the 2008 global financial crisis, has taken a seat on the independent body that watches over Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company confirmed on Thursday.
The group he is joining, the Anthropic Long-Term Benefit Trust, exists to keep the company focused on building advanced AI that serves humanity over the long run. The Trust carries real weight: it can appoint members to Anthropic's board and offers guidance to both the board and top leadership whenever a decision touches on how AI might reshape society.
A Four-Person Trust
With Bernanke on board, the Trust now has four members. He sits alongside social entrepreneur Neil Buddy Shah, Richard Fontaine, who once served as a national security official under George W. Bush, and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, a former intelligence adviser to President Joe Biden. The company said Bernanke's long study of financial crises, and his firsthand experience steering the economy through one of its roughest chapters, would help it judge how AI could affect jobs and the wider economy.
"The potential of artificial intelligence is enormous, and so is the range of outcomes," Bernanke said in a statement. "How that potential plays out will depend, in part, on the institutions we build around it."
Arriving Amid Bubble Talk
His appointment lands at a moment when some investors and economists are warning that the torrent of money flowing into AI looks a lot like the speculative frenzies of earlier market booms. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said earlier this year that the chipmaker is probably done making large investments in OpenAI and Anthropic, as both edge closer to possible public listings and the argument over whether AI valuations have swelled into a bubble grows louder.
The news also comes after a rocky patch between Anthropic and the Trump administration. Last month the Commerce Department briefly placed the company's newest AI models under export controls, then walked the decision back once Anthropic added extra safeguards and reached an understanding with U.S. officials.
A Divisive Legacy
Bernanke is still a divisive name in financial history. Leading the Fed from 2006 to 2014, he was at the helm as the U.S. housing market caved in and the crisis that followed dragged the global economy into its deepest slump since the Great Depression. Some economists praise his interventions for preventing an even worse collapse. Critics counter that regulators missed the dangers piling up before the crash, and they have long picked apart choices made in its wake, including the collapse of Lehman Brothers. In 2022 he shared the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his research into banks and financial crises.
