Former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke Joins Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust

Anthropic announced on July 9, 2026 the appointment of Ben Bernanke, distinguished scholar at the Brookings Institution and former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, as a new member of its Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT)—an independent oversight body that ensures the company adheres to its mission of responsibly developing advanced artificial intelligence for humanity's long-term benefit.

Who is Ben Bernanke

Bernanke led the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014, guiding the central bank through the 2008 global financial crisis and subsequent economic recovery. Before joining the government, he spent more than two decades as an academic economist, with much of his career at Princeton University, where he chaired the economics department and built a significant body of research on the Great Depression and the role of banks in financial crises. This work earned him the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2022.

• Date of appointment — July 9, 2026
• Position at Anthropic — member of Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT)
• Bernanke's previous position — Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve (2006–2014)
• Award — Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, 2022

How the Long-Term Benefit Trust is structured

Anthropic is incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation—a company structured to balance commercial success with public good. The LTBT exists to help the company maintain this balance in the long term, serving as an oversight body for how Anthropic develops and applies AI. Trustees are selected for their expertise across a broad range of fields and are independent from company management and investors: they do not own stakes in Anthropic, do not participate in profits, and receive compensation only for their time and services.

"The potential of artificial intelligence is vast, as is the range of possible outcomes.

How that potential is realized will partly depend on the institutions we build around it," said Ben Bernanke.

Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, noted that Bernanke's career—from studying how economies respond to crisis moments to practically managing the world's largest economy during one such moment—will help the company better anticipate and respond to how advanced AI impacts the workforce and economies across the globe.

What it means

Bringing a figure of the caliber of a former Fed chair to Anthropic's oversight body demonstrates that the company is betting not only on technical progress in models, but on building institutions capable of tracking the economic consequences of advanced AI proliferation in the real world.