Former Fed chair Ben Bernanke joins Anthropic's AI oversight trust

Reuters

Thu, July 9, 2026 at 10:33 AM PDT 1 min read

July 9 (Reuters) - Anthropic said on Thursday it has appointed former U.S. Federal Reserve chair Ben ‌Bernanke to its Long-Term Benefit Trust, an oversight ‌body responsible for ensuring the AI startup remains committed to its ​public mission.

A Nobel laureate in economic sciences, Bernanke led the Fed from 2006 to 2014, steering the central bank through the 2008 financial crisis.

"The potential of artificial intelligence ‌is enormous, and ⁠so is the range of outcomes. How that potential plays out will depend, in ⁠part, on the institutions we build around it," Bernanke said in a statement.

Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust is an independent ​body whose ​members are selected for ​their diverse expertise and ‌have no financial stake in the startup.

The company operates as a public benefit corporation, aiming to balance commercial success with social and public benefit.

Bernanke joins Neil Buddy Shah, Richard Fontaine and Mariano-Florentino Cuellar on its Long-Term ‌Benefit Trust. They are independent ​of the company's management and investors ​and have the ​power to appoint and remove a majority ‌of its corporate board members.

He ​chaired the ​economics department at Princeton and built a body of research on the Great Depression and the role ​banks play in ‌financial crises — work that earned him the Nobel ​Prize in 2022.

(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in ​Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)