00:04:46 · Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott
[00:04:46] S2: Yeah. So we're going to unpack all of that for you. But before we do that, just a little reminder. Each week, we bring you not one, but two episodes. This episode, which is, you know, kinda covers the news of the week. And then on Sundays, we have our big interview with the movers and shakers of the tech world. And this week is a really exciting one. I'm talking to Jaron Lanier, friend of the pod. He was on the podcast years ago. I went to his house in Berkeley. We're surrounded by musical instruments in his kind of music room. He's got dreadlocks down to his shins. He's just a totally fascinating person. He's a well respected computer scientist, futurist. And, you know, what a week to speak to him again on this week where we have this Anthropic IPO shooting for something between 1,750,000,000,000 and 2,000,000,000,000. [00:05:41] S3: More than that of SpaceX earlier this year, which was, of course, the biggest ever stock stock listing, That IPO document, that S1, is very, very long. So we thought we'd break it down into three chunks. But first of all, I thought we should start with our overall impressions of it. There are similarities to the British government's budget, not least the leaks. [00:06:06] S2: There's no discussion of pints.
00:06:06 · Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott
[00:06:06] S2: There's no discussion of pints. [00:06:08] S3: There's no discussion of beer. I don't think. No. The similarity though is the leaks. And we've been talking about what's in this document for a few weeks now, and particularly the doom mongering in it. But I was really struck by how they push the responsible angle. So Anthropic's shtick has always been that they are developing AI responsibly with an understanding of its pitfalls, but with the hope and aim to navigate that safely for humanity. And they talk about that in the document, but also with the same premise on the financials as well. So I was really struck. They quote one of their investors telling them, Never let your company be worth a dollar more than it's worth. Anyway, so they're talking about this idea that they always try to under promise and over deliver. And so it's like, yes, we're carefully managing this potentially incredibly dangerous technology, but also the numbers look enormous, But you've got to trust us. We're not over egging the pudding here. [00:07:10] S2: I hope they don't over deliver on the whole civilizational annihilation aspect of things. Know, be like, woah, we underplayed that one. Bye bye, humanity. [00:07:21] S3: What did you... I mean, have you done some light reading?
00:07:21 · Katie Prescott, Danny Fortson
[00:07:21] S3: What did you... I mean, have you done some light reading? [00:07:24] S2: I have done some light reading. I've used ChatGPT and Claude to kind of pull things out. I have not read it cover to cover. Looking at it through this frame of... You know, because in the risk, you know, the risk factors, which is always, you know, boilerplate part of any IPOs, like, what could go wrong with this company? Where could we, you know, be undercut? How could your investment go badly as you, you know, you, new investor? And they spend a lot of time talking about the civilizational risk and losing control and all these things they've talked about before. And in that context, I thought it was really interesting where they lay out how, like, the governance of this company. Who controls Anthropic, who holds it accountable. [00:08:05] S3: And what jumps out on the governance front is that the seven founders, including CEO Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela Amodei, have got a majority shareholding vote of 50.1%, which essentially means that if all of us buy a share in the company, we don't have any control over how it's run. And the reason they give for that is they say, Well, we need to be able to control things for the public good, because it has this very unusual public benefit corporation structure with a trust over the top of that, aiming to shepherd how it's wrong. But that is a rather unusual way of doing things.
00:08:05 · Katie Prescott, Danny Fortson
[00:08:05] S3: And what jumps out on the governance front is that the seven founders, including CEO Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela Amodei, have got a majority shareholding vote of 50.1%, which essentially means that if all of us buy a share in the company, we don't have any control over how it's run. And the reason they give for that is they say, Well, we need to be able to control things for the public good, because it has this very unusual public benefit corporation structure with a trust over the top of that, aiming to shepherd how it's wrong. But that is a rather unusual way of doing things. [00:08:49] S2: Trust us. Yeah. And what's really interesting about that is also that single share retains that 50.1% voting power as long as there are at least three of the founders still at the company. So only when five of them have left does that thing kind of expire. So it's quite kind of ironclad And again, just gives them the power to be like, you know, usually when you buy into a company, you're buying a vote. You know, like, if you don't like how this company is run, you can vote to remove the CEO. [00:09:23] S3: And they set out the consequences of that, don't they? Quite clearly. They say, As a result, our governance structure may make it more difficult to replace our directors and management, including those seven co founders, and may have the effect of depriving our stockholders of an opportunity to sell their shares at a premium over prevailing market prices.
00:09:23 · Katie Prescott, Danny Fortson
[00:09:23] S3: And they set out the consequences of that, don't they? Quite clearly. They say, As a result, our governance structure may make it more difficult to replace our directors and management, including those seven co founders, and may have the effect of depriving our stockholders of an opportunity to sell their shares at a premium over prevailing market prices. [00:09:43] S2: Yeah. And it should be said, like, this is a tech thing. You know, Mark Zuckerberg is effectively the emperor of Meta. He can't be removed. He has majority control. Like, this is what a lot of tech founders do. [00:09:54] S3: And they make a big point, don't they, in the document of still having the seven cofounders in place? Yeah. And they don't explicitly say it, but clearly their massive rival, OpenAI, where they all used to work, doesn't have that at all. [00:10:09] S2: Yeah. It's like more of a viper's nest. Everybody's left. [00:10:11] S3: It's that famous photo of all the co founders with their faces, the ones who've left faces blanked out. [00:10:17] S2: That's right. [00:10:17] S3: But they do say as well that, you know, the reason they're doing this is because sometimes they will have to I have to read some of the jargon depart from profit maximization in order to appropriately balance the public good. So they may have to make decisions about the company that might not be financially the best decision, but might be the best for safety. Right. For humanity, for the country of geniuses in a data center that they create.
00:10:17 · Katie Prescott, Danny Fortson
[00:10:17] S3: But they do say as well that, you know, the reason they're doing this is because sometimes they will have to I have to read some of the jargon depart from profit maximization in order to appropriately balance the public good. So they may have to make decisions about the company that might not be financially the best decision, but might be the best for safety. Right. For humanity, for the country of geniuses in a data center that they create. [00:10:44] S2: There is this other layer that we should talk about, which is this long term benefit trust, which is... Has up to seven trustees, and they have the power to remove board members. So there is this level of oversight, but they can't kind of affect strategy. They can move people from the board. It's unclear whether they... That would actually include... Like, if they removed, for some reason, Dario Amodei from the board, would he still be the CEO? Right? I think he would be. But those long term benefit trusts, which has power to hire and fire the the board, is really interesting. And it's led by this guy, Neil Shah, who is the former CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative of Global Health and Development. Inside, we'll just go through briefly who these people are because I think it kind of paints a picture as to how Anthropic thinks about their technologies. The other people are Richard Fontaine. He is the CEO of the Center for a New American Security and National Security Specialist. Ben Bernanke, former head of the Federal Reserve. [00:11:48] S3: Probably the only name I know, actually.