WSJ Picks Apart Anthropic's Opaque Five-Member Benefit Trust That Can Reshape the Board Pre-IPO

The Wall Street Journal profiled Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust, an unusual five-member body that holds no equity yet has already picked four of seven board directors and can replace the board majority via Class T common stock with negligible economic rights. Current trustees Neil 'Buddy' Shah, Richard Fontaine and Ben Bernanke meet weekly and get advance notice of model launches, but Anthropic has not published the trust agreement, the deliberative process or the blocking thresholds. No tech company has gone public with this kind of non-shareholder override, which the piece flags as a novel governance test for Anthropic's planned November IPO.