Anthropic just started the world dividend. Now who runs it?

Anthropic announced this week that it's putting 5% of its shares into a "public benefit fund", with the option to chuck in another 2% every time the company's value goes up by half, and it reckons that with what the founders and staff have already pledged, about a fifth of the whole company is now earmarked for the public good.¹ What the fund will actually do is still a bit vague, "large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations", with the details promised "in the coming months", and jobs lost to AI named as one of the reasons.² Elon Musk, never one to miss a microphone, immediately replied that the shares should just go straight to the public, which is a lovely sound bite from a man with a few spare companies of his own.

I'm genuinely glad somebody went first, and I mean that. But do the maths. If that 5% is worth something like $48 billion, which is what one widely shared estimate reckons,³ and you split it across the roughly 8 billion people on the planet, you get about six dollars each, once. Invest it and pay out the returns instead and it's more like thirty cents a year. That's not universal basic income, or universal high income as Musk likes to call it, that's a voucher.

One company can't build a world dividend, and frankly neither can one country.

Which is the point really. If this is the start of AI paying something back to the people whose jobs it's busy eating, and I think it might be, then it can't be left to whichever founder is feeling generous that quarter. You'd need governments, NGOs and the AI companies all pulling in the same direction at the same time, agreeing who actually counts as a person so nobody claims twice, how the money reaches the 1.4 billion adults who don't have a bank account, who pays tax on what and in which country, and which slice of the value AI creates gets shared in the first place, because 5% of one company's shares is a gesture, a share of every AI company's output is an economy.

We've done versions of this before, at a much smaller scale. Alaska has been paying its residents a dividend from oil for decades, Norway parks its oil money in a fund that owns a slice of nearly every listed company on earth, and charities have been sending cash straight to people's phones in places the banks never bothered with. None of them had to do it for the whole planet, across every currency, legal system and government that would quite like a cut on the way through.

So the real question isn't whether Anthropic is being generous. It's who ends up running the thing. The US isn't going to hand that to the UN, China isn't going to hand it to the US, and the AI companies would love to do it themselves, which is exactly the problem. Sam Altman wrote back in 2021 that every company above a certain size should pay 2.5% of its value each year, in shares, into a fund that sends every American adult an annual distribution,⁵ which is a perfectly sensible idea right up until you remember he also co-founded World, the company scanning people's eyeballs to prove who counts as a human, so the same man would be designing the fund and running the head count. And that's more or less the attitude of every big tech boss I can think of, all very keen on making the world a better place as long as they're the ones holding the clipboard.

Whoever controls who gets counted, how they get paid and how much goes round is, in practice, the closest thing we've ever had to a leader of the world. I'm not sure any of the candidates are ready, and I'm fairly sure most of them shouldn't be trusted with it. What I do know is that the boring bits, proving you're a real person, having somewhere to receive the money and moving it across borders cheaply, are the bits that have to work first, and they're exactly the plumbing we're building at VIA for agents. If the world dividend ever turns up, it will need that plumbing for people too.