Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust explained: who sits on it and what power it holds before the IPO

The Long-Term Benefit Trust is the unusual body that sits above Anthropic's board, and the company's IPO is about to test whether it survives contact with public shareholders. Anthropic created the Trust in 2023 to keep a safety-minded check on a company that sells some of the most powerful AI systems in the world. With the stock expected to begin trading as ANT within days, the questions that mattered in a blog post now matter in a prospectus.

What the Trust is

Anthropic describes the Long-Term Benefit Trust as "an independent body of five financially disinterested members" when it announced it on September 19, 2023. It is organized as a Delaware purpose trust, and its purpose matches Anthropic's public benefit mission. Anthropic itself is a public benefit corporation, a company form that under Delaware law must balance shareholders' financial interests, the interests of people materially affected by its conduct, and a stated public purpose. The roadshow announcement of November 10, 2026 calls the issuer "Anthropic, PBC."

The Trust's job, in Anthropic's words, is to ensure the company balances stockholder interests against the interests of people affected by its conduct and its public benefit purpose. It is expected to focus on long-range, high-stakes risks, not day-to-day commercial decisions. Anthropic was candid about the experiment: "The Long-Term Benefit Trust is an experiment." It added that "We're not yet ready to hold this out as an example to emulate".

How the Trust gets its power

The mechanism is a special class of stock. When Anthropic closed its Series C round, it created Class T stock, held only by the Trust. Class T lets the Trust elect and remove a portion of the board. That portion was designed to phase in based on time and funding milestones, with the Trust expected to elect a board majority within four years of the 2023 announcement.

Class T also carries protective provisions, so the Trust must receive notice of certain actions that could significantly change the company or its business. And there is a failsafe. Most changes to the arrangement are expected to be agreed between the trustees and the board or other stockholders, but the terms allow changes without trustee consent if large supermajorities of stockholders agree, with thresholds that rise as the Trust's power phases in. That detail is the one to remember when reading IPO coverage, because it says the Trust's authority was never absolute.

Who sits on it now

Anthropic's page, updated through October 2026, lists four current trustees: Neil Buddy Shah (chair), Richard Fontaine, who leads the Center for a New American Security, Dr. Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chair, and Dr. Christopher Stubbs, a Harvard physics and astronomy professor. The original 2023 five were Jason Matheny, Kanika Bahl, Neil Buddy Shah, Paul Christiano and Zach Robinson.

The turnover is real. Matheny left in December 2023, Christiano in April 2024, Bahl and Robinson in January 2026, and Tino Cuéllar in August 2026 to become Anthropic's Chief Global Affairs Officer. Future trustees are chosen by the trustees themselves, which makes the group self-perpetuating. That is by design, and it is also the source of the main criticism.

What changes at the IPO

A Columbia Law School blog essay published October 2, 2026 by Marco Mari, a PhD candidate at Bocconi University, lays out the structure as reported in the lead-up to the listing. It is an opinion piece, and it relies on reporting we have not independently confirmed. According to the essay, the founders and the Trust would effectively choose every director, and public investors would have no power to independently elect board representatives.

The essay cites Reuters, relaying The Information on September 24, as reporting a proposal giving the seven co-founders 50.1% of votes on key shareholder matters, exercised through a single Class F share directed by a majority of the founders through a Founder LLC. The special rights would sunset when two or fewer founders, or their successors, remain. The board would have seven directors: the Trust elects four, and Class A and Class F shareholders elect the other three, with the founders holding the controlling vote.

If that is the final structure, public buyers of ANT would own shares with limited governance rights. That is not unusual for a technology IPO, where dual-class voting is common. What is unusual is the explicit mission layer. Mari notes a 2024 study by Professor Jens Dammann that found dual-class shares in nine of nineteen listed public benefit corporations, and he suggests a model where public shareholders elect a minority of the board, as Class A holders do at the New York Times Company.

The strongest arguments on each side

For the structure: a lab that believes its technology could be dangerous may reasonably want a body that can resist short-term profit pressure, and the founders argue they need control to interpret the mission. Mari concedes that founder control has a serious justification but questions its scope and duration.

Against it: insulating the people who interpret the mission from shareholder challenge also blocks investors who want more caution, not less. The essay quotes Professor Emily Winston on the "separation of benefit and control," meaning a public benefit corporation's intended beneficiaries generally gain no governance rights. And a Trust that picks its own successors answers to no one outside itself.

What to watch

We do not give investment advice, and this is not a view on the stock. The facts to track are in the final prospectus: the exact voting rights of each class, the number of directors the Trust can still elect, the supermajority needed to change the arrangement, and the sunset terms. Our reporting on the amended S-1 and its safety language and on investor doubts before the roadshow covers the money side. The governance side is where the next test comes: whether a trust built in 2023 holds up when quarterly earnings, a share price and a $1 trillion valuation are all pushing the other way.