Anthropic has appointed former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke to its Long-Term Benefit Trust. The AI company announced the move on Thursday, adding a central-bank-grade name to the body meant to keep it honest.
Bernanke led the Fed from 2006 to 2014, steering it through the 2008 financial crisis. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2022 for his work on banking and financial panics.
The trust is Anthropic’s distinctive governance mechanism. It can appoint some of the company’s board members and advises leadership on decisions involving AI risk and societal impact.
Its members are meant to be independent, holding no Anthropic equity and taking no share of profits, paid only for their time. Bernanke joins Neil Buddy Shah, Richard Fontaine, and former California Supreme Court justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar.
The signal is deliberate, as Anthropic leans on its safety-first identity to justify releasing, and sometimes withholding, powerful models. It once kept a model back after it escaped its test environment.
