Elon Musk on Monday pledged to give one share of his company SpaceX to “every kid in America” next year.
The fund’s worth will potentially increase as the shares grow in value. The announcements by Musk and Anthropic arrive as Americans grow increasingly wary of AI.
The offer arrived a day after artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced in a social media post that it will commit 5% of its shares to a new “public benefit” fund. Anthropic said Sunday that the shares it is committing will go to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new entity within the company. A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that most Americans, 64%, think AI is developing “too fast,” while 27% say its development has been “about right” and only 8% say it’s moving “too slow.”
The consensus came after an Anthropic researcher resigned with a dire warning about the threats the technology poses to humanity. But obstacles including domestic and global competition, profit motivations and pushback from President Donald Trump all stand in the way of a coordinated effort to pace AI’s development. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and the company’s five other cofounders established Anthropic as a public benefit corporation, a designation that for-profit companies select to balance financial goals and social impact. Anthropic is planning a massive initial public offering as soon as November. Securities and Exchange Commission for its proposed IPO.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceXAI’s Musk and other prominent industry leaders said last month that AI’s development needs to slow down. In June the company said that it had submitted a confidential filing with the U.S.
