Public sentiment toward the AI industry is broadly negative. Now, the companies are leaning into public-good initiatives to try and change the narrative.

On Sunday, Anthropic announced the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new nonprofit arm that, subject to stockholder approval, will receive 5% of Anthropic's shares, with an additional 2% added at the board's discretion for every 50% increase in the company's value above the a set baseline, according to the blog post. Anthropic says the Fund is intentionally structured in a way that, the larger it gets, the more it can contribute to society.

While the company already operates as a public benefit corporation, or a company built to balance profit with public good, Anthropic says this new arm will have increased flexibility and scale to take actions such as making large donations to traditional nonprofits.

The fund will also work in tandem with the public good initiatives it already has in place, including:

• Committing $200 million to the Anthropic Economic Futures Research Fund that focuses on research of the economic impacts of AI;
• The companies' co-founders' pledge to donate 80% of their equity holdings;
• And the equity donation match program that allows employees to pledge equity which Anthropic matches. Half of its employees participate in it currently.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk, CEO and founder of SpaceX (and its AI arm known as SpaceXSI) announced on X that next year, he plans to give one of his SpaceX shares to "every kid in America." He also claimed that it would be the first of many, offering no additional details.

As CNBC reported, Musk currently owns about 4.8 billion SpaceX shares, and there were 72 million children under 18 in the US as of July 1, 2025, according to census data. Musk would be, therefore, giving away about $10.5 billion worth of shares, using SpaceX's closing stock price on Friday. As this announcement is limited to an X post, and Musk has a track-record for not following through on philanthropic promises, there is no guarantee that it will actually come to fruition. Yet, even if it does, it would still be lapped by Anthropic's contributions, which will likely come out to the $75 billion to $100 billion range, according to Reuters.

Our Deeper View

There is no denying that, at face value, these are generous donations whose outcomes would be beneficial, and certainly better than no contribution at all. It is also worth noting, however, what these companies stand to gain from taking actions of this sort. Prioritizing public perception is becoming increasingly necessary for them to carry out the plans they need to maximize profits. The data center buildout, for instance, depends in large part on local and federal policymakers, whose decisions are influenced by how they are perceived by the public. Without sustained goodwill, that support may not materialize. Securing favor with those in a position to influence those decisions matters just as much. Anthropic is in an especially vulnerable position: the company could go public as early as November, in what would potentially be the largest IPO of a public benefit corporation ever, and markets are moved by investor perception.