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Anthropic just gave away 5% of their company to you, and everyone seems to be mad about it.

Now, at their rumored $2.2 trillion IPO valuation, that's around $100 billion,

which is the largest philanthropic raise of capital ever.

That's more than the Gates Foundation ever raised. That is more than the entire

GDP of Costa Rica, and is enough money to run NASA for four years straight.

So you might be wondering, why on earth is everyone mad about this?

Well, there's a few reasons. Number one, the shares don't actually go to you or the public directly.

It goes to a mixture of NGOs, charities, and in some cases, and I quote,

specific populations of people.

Who they are is up to anthropics. So that's a little bit murky.

But there's also a more unsettling reason, which is something Dario Modi has

spoken about at length over the last couple of years, which is AI might wipe

out a huge number of jobs.

His quote was 50% of white-collar jobs over the next one to five years.

In the event of that happening, it is uncertain what the purpose of humanity

or individual humans will be, or more importantly, how they'll make a living to sustain themselves.

In the event of that, we would need to introduce something along the forms of

universal basic income, which would be

a dividend or a payout that comes in the form of a monthly salary or stipend

to individuals so that they'll be able to pay for things like groceries and keep themselves going.

Now, this concept might seem dystopian to some, it certainly feels dystopian to me.

We're going to unpack all of this, what exactly Anthropic is doing,

and why this is actually part of a broader trend that we're seeing amongst all

the leading AI labs, which may signal that this isn't something that we can necessarily stop.

So let's get into it on today's episode brought to you by Qualcomm.

Firstly, I think it's important to define what universal basic income even is.

Think of it as like a regular cash payment to every individual on earth.

So the universal part of universal basic income literally means to anyone and everyone.

Now, the basic refers to just enough money for people or that individual to

maintain their basic level of living.

So paying for things like groceries, rent, stuff like that. And then income

indicates that it's going to be a regular form of payments. So something that

you might receive monthly, like a salary or biweekly, like a salary.

And this isn't a novel concept. This has been spoken about for decades and decades.

But Sam Altman back in 2021, actually raised this for the first time when he

introduced something known as the American Equity Fund.

And the concept behind this was, it would be a tax, a 2.5% tax,

I believe, on the biggest companies that benefit from AI in the future.

And the idea here is, this tax or this fee would be paid directly to individuals

within that economy, within that nation, or all over the world.

And at the time, that meant that $13,500 would go into the pockets of every

single American every single year.

But he also tested this concept over the following three years up until 2024,

where he gave 1,000 low-income Americans...

$1,000 each every single month. And the results of that show things that you

may not have expected, where people just ended up becoming a little more lazier,

or they didn't really strive to create anything net new.

Now, fast forward to 2025 of last year, and Dario Modi introduces his infamous

piece on AI basically wiping out 50% of white-collar jobs over the next one to five years.

And his reasoning then was to introduce something known as a 3% token tax,

which would function similarly to what Sam Altman proposed four years earlier.

And then we had earlier this year, OpenAI converting their structure into some

form of a non-profit, which roughly holds enough equity that I think is attributable to $135 billion.

And the idea of this is sort of similar to what Anthropic has just proposed,

a public benefit corporation that will feed shares or the value that this company

eventually ends up generating to the public good.

But then the question becomes, what's different about Anthropic's proposal?

So it starts off with saying that Anthropic has created a wholly separate entity

for the public benefit, and that they are committing, subject to board approval, 5%

of their entire company, so in equity, to this company.

Now, this company is structured as an LLC, not a public benefit corporation.

And the reason cited for this is flexibility.

It would give Anthropic the ability to give in many different ways.

And they also stated that there's no political agenda behind this.

It is purely meant to benefit the public. But how it benefits the public is,

I guess, where the secret source of this entire announcement is.

In their words, they say they might explore large donations to traditional non-profits

or direct distributions to specific populations. Now, you could argue that.

Arguably one of the best insights into this because they're actually building the models.

They have done multiple research profiles actually speaking to the users of

Claude and people who don't use Claude yet trying to understand what the impact is of AI.

So in Anthropics defense, they've actually been incredibly proactive and public

in sharing the results from this type of research.

So you could actually argue that they do have really good insight as to how

these AI models are actually going to impact the world and global population.

But also, they wouldn't have the entire insight into this. The only way we're

actually going to understand is just releasing these models to humanity and

observing what actually happens over the next couple of years.

And actually, Jack Clark, who is a co-founder of Anthropic,

went on record in saying that this is meant to be an intentional act of benefiting

humanity from the spoils or the economic wealth that is going to be generated

from Anthropic's models.

But also it's meant to act as a hedge or an insurance policy for whatever problem

or disruption plays out in a world where AI models replace a large amount of

jobs or people's purpose or their ability to make a living.

Now, it's important to understand that this isn't actually universal basic income.

Income is something that happens more regularly. This is more of a 5% upfront

here and now with the promise that if Anthropik's valuation increases 50%.

Every 50%, they will add another 2% of the company's equity.

Now, what I found interesting is how they're funding this equity.

The 5% is just being given de novo, and so will the additional 2% for every 50% increase.

But what I didn't realize is Anthropik has collectively committed up to 20%.

Of the company's equity to the public good.

Which is absolutely insane, especially for a company that is the fastest growing private company ever.

Now, where this equity comes from is even more interesting. When the founders

created Anthropic, they foresaw

that this would be an issue or a problem or a challenge that they would need

to prepare for in the event that AI models became super powerful or super intelligent.

Now, it's important to point out this was before Claude even existed.

Anthropic founders committed 80% of their equity to this cause,

to the wider public benefit.

And they also created a matching program, which 50% of Anthropic employees actually

participate in, where they just willingly give their equity,

which will be used for the public good.

Over the years that Anthropic has existed, which is not that long,

they have committed 20% of the company's equity that will now be handed towards

the public with the promise of maybe even 2% with every 50% increase of the company's valuation.

So this is some form of altruism that we have not seen in any other company before.

And it's important to understand how the numbers play out. So I did a bit of a calculation here.

And at the $2 trillion valuation, which is what their rumored IPO is going to

be at, that would be $100 billion.

But then with every 2% increase at, let's say $3 trillion.

$4.5 trillion, and so forth, that would be an extra $60 billion,

$90 billion, $135 billion, and eventually

$200 billion at a $10 trillion valuation, which if you assume that.

These AI companies are going to consume a large portion of the economy,

where AI is going to be able to.

Considered very valuable work today, that doesn't seem out of reach.

So these are the facts of what Anthropic announced over the weekend on Saturday.

But I think the public reaction really shows you where people's heads are at

with this, including myself, which I want to share honestly.

But firstly, some of the most common public reactions were largely negative.

Some people saw this as a PR stunt pre-IPO just to make Anthropic seem like

a very relatable and caring company so that people would buy into the equity.

There's also a more economically strategic critique that we saw where if Anthropic

portrays themselves as this public benefit corporation where individuals would

potentially own shares, they would have skin in the game.

So they would be more economically incentivized to buy into the IPO.

And someone pointed out that this would be a very handy or convenient backstop

for Anthropic in the event that they need some form of a bailout.

If the majority of the population of the world or even America had an economic

stake in Anthropic, they would be more willing to vote politically to be able

to bail them out in the future in the event that anything catastrophic ends up happening.

David Sachs, who is the former AI czar of the US, pointed out that he's...

Going to wait back and see what Anthropic actually does. Committing 20% of your

equity is one thing, but actually using those funds for good is a complete other

beast that hasn't really been solved by philanthropy at scale just yet.

So he'll wait back and see what happens. Palmer Lucky made a really good point

where he said the definition of public good is going to be something that Anthropic

and a few individuals within Anthropic define

and is likely not going to be something that the wider public can help influence

because they are a private company.

Or even if they go public, they're still technically at the whim of their shareholders

or whoever owns the majority of the equity, which right now are the founders

collectively and investors. So it's still not going to be a genuine representation

of what humanity believes that's going to be.

And I guess Anthropik's response to this will be, well, that's why we're distributing

it to multiple different charities so that it's not part of what our jurisdictional

definition is going to be.

So i could see both sides of that and then you have travis kalanick the former

ceo of uber who basically said that this is an extension of the effective altruist movement

which is a political critique that anthropic has faced quite a lot they have

shown to have ties to the ea movement which,

focuses on i guess a more duma outtake which is very reflective of what dario

believes or thinks will happen.

But kind of putting the political agenda aside, the Doomer aspect of this isn't something that we could.

Necessarily ignore, which would be my opinion, right?

Like, you could see the Duma case playing out pretty realistically,

if you allow these AI models to get out of hand, or if we just maybe naively

assume that AI isn't going to replace a bunch of different things.

I truly don't believe that. But I do believe we need to take a more optimistic

approach to preparing humans well for this.

Now, whether universal basic income or some form of economic stipend,

like a 5% handover of shares to the public wide world is a good thing or not?

I don't know. That's something that we have to try and figure out.

I think one of the more practical takes I saw was basically asking Anthropic

to keep their stake, or rather use the stake themselves and determine how they

can more economically benefit the wider world.

Their point being, if Anthropic were to give this stake over to charities,

charities don't have the best track record of being able to fulfill the public good.

A lot of the money goes to execs or people that kind of fund the board or sit on the board.

It's much better off being in the hands of the company that actually generated

the economic value in the first place.

And this was actually the point that Elon Musk made in response.

He said, listen, either you give these shares directly to the public or figure

out a way to benefit humans at scale. And I'm going to say,

Elon actually went on to say that he plans to give every single kid in America

one share of SpaceX next year in 2027.

Now, if you run the math on that, I think there's around 73 million kids in

America today, well, projected to be next year.

And so to give them each a share, let's take the IPO valuation of $135.

That's around $10 billion.

These are huge numbers to play out. and I see his reasoning.

His reasoning is basically the best way to figure out how this universal basic

income will work for individuals is to give it directly to them and not add

intermediaries in the form of charities.

Figure it out yourself is basically what he's saying and what he plans to do with SpaceX.

Which brings me on to a wider point around this not being a novel experience

or initiative for Anthropic. They for sure are the first ones to take steps in the direction of.

Creating some form of a scheme or agenda. This is the first step that we're seeing from Anthropic.

Maybe it evolves over time, but this is something that has been spoken about

by all leading labs, OpenAI, Google, Elon Musk, and now through extension of Elon Musk, SpaceX.

So the wider point then becomes, why is this necessary?

And I've been trying to process my feelings and thoughts about this.

And I came to the conclusion that since the dawn of humanity,

humans have had a purpose.

And that purpose has been to invent, to create, to innovate,

to push the boundaries of humanity

and what we could create beyond what we understood at that point in time.

Without that drive, we would not have been able to discover all the wonderful

things that we have in science, medicine, physics, chemistry.

In art, in poetry, and all the types of literature that we've seen over the decades and millennia.

The point is, human innovation has driven so many different things.

Now, when computers came, when any other technological wave has come in,

it has always aided human beings in doing this, in innovating.

But AI is very different in the sense that they're sort of replacing the role

of humans, or it could potentially replace the role of humans.

And in the event that it is able to do this, in the event that you can stick

an AI model in a robot and it could automate both the mental human software

cognition of a human as well as the physical cognition of a human.

Then what are humans meant to be used for? Do we just sit around all day?

Do we need to be babied by this super intelligence that knows a lot better than

us, that knows how to raise us, how to monitor us, how to herd us?

Do we just end up becoming some form of organic waste? Now, that is a bearish

take, in my opinion, but that was what was going through my head and what I

think kind of like fed in through my unsettling behavior.

But when I applied my kind of like logic to this, I realized that there's probably

no way of avoiding the scenario that humans will end up having a lot more free time on their hands.

But I don't necessarily think that that's a bad thing. I think that that could

result in a much more optimistic outcome, which is we can operate on a much

higher order of thinking and creativity. Think about it.

Right now, we spend a lot of our time crunching Excel sheets,

going through emails, texting people, scrolling, trying to ingest information,

compute that information, all to achieve some kind of specific outcome.

But what if you get an AI to automate a bunch of that for you whilst bringing

you up to speed so that you can spend your time doing way more productive things?

Now, maybe at a high level that looks like managing a fleet of different AI

agents or AI models, or managing a bunch of artificial intelligences to help

you advance in your personal and professional work life.

Maybe that's a future that would exist today, right?

In this optimistic sense, people can end up probably innovating at a faster

and much larger extent than we ever have before.

But as Anthropik's announcement said in their post, they don't really know what

might happen or what this disruption may end up being the case.

And I guess that's where the unsettling feeling comes from. It's not.

Disagreeing with Anthropic's take. It's not being a complete doomer about this entire thing.

It's about not knowing where this all ends up and only time will tell.

We don't know the crazy disruption that Anthropic or any AI lab will have when

they release their models that are crossing the intelligence level of an average human being.

We haven't reached that bit just yet. we're starting to see it broach in certain

fields with mathematics.

Over the last couple of weeks, we had internal models from OpenAI solve 20%

of mathematics toughest problems. And you had,

what do we do about this? How do we fulfill our roles as mathematicians if we

can just get an AI doing the same thing?

We're starting to see the same thing in the field of physics,

and eventually this will spill

out into any and every human labor or professional job that we see today.

So I understand that point of view, but there's no telling how severe this is

going to be or whether humans actually end up better than they expected.

David Sachs actually critiqued Dario Mode's prediction that 50% of white-collar

jobs will be wiped out over the next one to five years by showing data that

white-collar jobs actually hadn't been replaced, but had actually increased.

Coding was the best example for this. When Call Code launched at the end of

last year, fast forward to today, these coding models became really good.

And they technically right now can replace a lot of L5 and L6 staff engineers' jobs.

But we haven't seen that. We've seen instead these companies hire more engineers

to instead manage these different AI agent fleets.

So the idea here is what we presume to be a Duma take actually ended up being

way more positive for humans.

So this could end up happening, but there's no certainty in determining how

it's going to happen or how it's going to play out.

And so I guess going back to Jack Clark, the Anthropic co-founder's take on

all of this is we need to hedge against the risk of people losing their jobs

or people having to evolve their jobs we don't quite know how that's going to look like but

this is our best attempt at trying to address what that is so let me leave you

with my own personal thoughts as to

how this plays out and how this is going to impact you and i over the next couple

of years because i think there's a lot of ways that this can go so let's get

into it on today's episode brought to you by qualcomm.

So let's start off with the optimistic take, which is universal high income,

which is beyond basic income.

It means that everyone gets a lot of money and we benefit from the vast amount

of wealth that AI and superintelligence ends up generating in this world. It's a panacea.

Everyone gets enough money, the wealth gap closes, and you're able to afford

anything and everything that you had hoped to afford in the first place there's

no shortage of supply or goods and services

and everyone gets to live a much better life order of magnitudes better than what they

currently exist today so it's not some form of communism it's not some form

of extreme capitalism it's the benefits or measures of both of those things

together in this world the machines would basically do.

Everything for you and it leaves you up with more time to do whatever you want

whether that's spending time with family, creating more memories,

or just creating or inventing other stuff on your own that maybe feeds into

the economy that the machines and AI actually operate.

The question I have is, what's the evidence of that actually happening?

And I think a good case study was the one that OpenAI ran that I mentioned earlier

on, which basically gave 1,000 people with household income around $30,000 a

year, so not very much the lower income bracket, $1,000 a month for three years.

The results of the data basically showed that people didn't end up inventing or creating more.

They just worked a little less, roughly an hour and a half a week,

reported at least, and no measurable improvement in job quality.

So in that event, people just decided to take the stipend and get increasingly

lazier. And then putting aside both of these scenarios, the optimistic take

and the doomer take, what's the right structure to actually build this entire

thing? Because in my opinion.

There needs to be some form of universal basic income or universal high income,

whatever you want to call it.

But the hardest challenge is going to be delivering that.

Should it be what Anthropik's done, which is donating the shares to a separate

entity and then giving those away to charities and then specific populations?

Is it a private company defining what public good is going to be,

defining who gets the money and who doesn't?

Or is it some form of committee that represents every single class of individual

person, human being, profession, sector, industry, and them collectively coming to an agreement?

I don't know the answer, but it seems very complex across the board and something

that needs to be probably discussed and worked on and experimented with over

time. But the point is, we're here.

It's an unprecedented announcement. This goes beyond just the model updates.

This goes beyond what you're using AI agents for in your day-to-day business.

This is the wider impact on humanity. This is the wider course or inevitable

conclusion of where AI eventually leads us.

Think about it. Just play it out for a second. AI models are smart right now,

but what happens when they become smarter than humans? What happens when they

have robotic limbs and arms that can do all the physical labor and work that we do currently today?

What happens when AI can replace anything and everything that gives humans purpose and value today.

I don't mean to try and sound philosophical.

I mean to sound how I think things might eventually end up playing out.

And again, as I mentioned earlier, this is not to be a doomer about it all.

I guess, to try and figure out or start a conversation between you and I about

what this eventually ends up looking like. It's a weird world.

I don't quite know how it's going to end up, but I remain optimistic that having

these conversations, starting these initiatives, and I'm glad to see Anthropic

taking the first step, is a good way to figure all of this out,

because it's going to be a very weird world.

Think about it. If people just got a regular stipend, it would be very predictable

how the economy or spending habits might actually end up progressing.

It'll affect the investment market. It will affect spending on consumer goods

and services, as well as just habits and general drive of the population and people.

Right now, you have a very vast

and eclectic mix of humans that are just trying to make it in the world.

They express that through the jobs and the degrees and the universities that

they attend and strive to try and achieve, the certifications,

the prowess, the status.

But what does that look like in a world where everyone is sort of fed the same,

stipend or money and what happens in a world where that is a necessity that

actually has to be the case it's just weird and it is a step away from capitalism

or maybe an evolution of capitalism.

But let me know what your thoughts are on this if you have an opinion or if

you have a take or if you just agree in some things please let me know and also

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We are going to be here five days a week, you know? So anything and everything

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Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode of In

The Loop brought to you by Qualcomm.