YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Investing in the public benefit

34 points surprisetalk 2 hours ago 39 comments

andsoitis 1 hour ago | parent

> It is common practice for tech companies to offer escalating compensation awards to their executives. We are instead directing that equity to the public benefit.

Dario Amodei's 2025 total comp is reported to have been $18m.

His sister, Daniela Amodei's was $16.4m.

For reference, Sundar Pichai's reported comp in 2025 was $10.5m.

SeanAnderson 1 hour ago | parent

Is the $18m comp package based on secondary market valuations for stock or what? Seems like you'd want to be at least a little careful comparing public stock comp to private.

andsoitis 1 hour ago | parent

According to the company's confidential IPO S-1 prospectus filing revealed in October 2026 that Reuters reported on. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/anthropics-ipo-pros...

I haven't seen the confidential prospectus and haven't read reports on whether it is based on secondary market value, but it is mostly stock. His base salary was only $1.4m in 2025, but doubled in 2026.

piterrro 1 hour ago | parent

> Sundar Pichai has an estimated net worth of at least $1.0 billion*, as of Oct. 14, 2026. They own 2.2 million shares of GOOGL stock. They have sold 1.4 million shares of GOOGL stock since 2021, for an estimated $231.4 million.

Anthropic is pre IPO, so this is comparing apples to oranges.

simianwords 46 minutes ago | parent

In 2022, Sundar Pichai’s reported total compensation was about $226 million.

I'm not sure why you left that out?

ram1500natrluvr 15 minutes ago | parent

And his potential pay for the next 3 years is in that range as well. Was 2025 specifically a cherry-picked off year for him? Or is the $10.5m simply false?

anonym29 23 minutes ago | parent

Is this not a bit low for a company with a $1.5T-$2T market cap and the levels of revenue that Anthropic has? I mean compared to market cap / revenue peers, not compared to employees or in absolute terms.

jimmydoe 1 hour ago | parent

Wenn das Geld im Kasten klingt, die Seele aus dem Fegfeuer springt.

ideashower 1 hour ago | parent

I had to translate it.

> As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.

It's quite poetic. And tragically true.

colinhb 47 minutes ago | parent

Who is today's Martin Luther, for people laundering their bad deeds?

simianwords 44 minutes ago | parent

"anthropic bad because some reason"

ajhg 38 minutes ago | parent

This is a reference to indulgence sales by the Catholic Church, which bought you a clear conscience.

Apparently it is lost on an Anthropic bot.

simianwords 35 minutes ago | parent

"anthropic bad because it makes profit" smh

crmd 1 hour ago | parent

>We’re establishing the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund as a wholly-owned LLC—rather than a 501(c)(3) or other format—to give adjustability between different forms of giving.

nickysielicki 1 hour ago | parent

FTX Future Fund 2: Electric Boogaloo.

ryan_glass 59 minutes ago | parent

The greatest public benefit you could provide would be to open source your models.

sligbad 14 minutes ago | parent

This was really loud in my mind reading this post. It seems so obvious!

go_elmo 55 minutes ago | parent

A corporation so big it starts doing the job of the collective / state - interesting, whos job are they taking here? Why not pay taxes and let us, the people decide how to use it instead?

sdqer35r 48 minutes ago | parent

Don Fanucci was publicly donating a lot of money in The Godfather.

esafak 43 minutes ago | parent

This is for PR. They need to be able to generate more revenue than they take from economically-redundant humans in order to make them whole. This is certainly possible, but it's going to take government action; AI companies are never going to return that much money left to their own devices.

kennywinker 27 minutes ago | parent

The cyberpunk future awaits us! All hail the corpo owning class. I can't wait to move to the company town, those always work out well.

Geezus_42 26 minutes ago | parent

Straight out of Snowcrash.

bryan0 19 minutes ago | parent

> Why not pay taxes and let us, the people decide how to use it instead?

Maybe because the current administration has no interest in doing this and Anthropic doesn't want to wait for this cluster-f of a situation to sort itself out. Even if the current admin was for progressive taxation it might take them years to sort through all the bureaucracy to use this money effectively which might be much too late.

But in theory I think you're right.

novaRom 54 minutes ago | parent

Anthropic has a large in-house PR machine (80 people). Main functions are "attention flooding", well-resourced news-blitz strategy.

jjsullivan5196 54 minutes ago | parent

why cant the robot do it?

ande-mnoc 34 minutes ago | parent

Anthropic has a PR machine? Doesn’t seem it’s working very well.

sydd 26 minutes ago | parent

They make it to the frontpage of every major newspaper multiple times a week. I'd say that they are doing exceptionally well.

solyin 14 minutes ago | parent

There's a scene in Wolf of Wall street where the main character is interviewed for a newspaper article about the trading firm he runs. The newspaper article comes out and it's very damaging. The very next scene, however, is their office being inundated with applicants to work there. It's working exceedingly well, you're just not the target market.

128375 53 minutes ago | parent

Will you launch a public benefit program that help unemployed software engineers become coal miners?

Please just fuck off with your next scam on a beige background.

jfckenfishf 42 minutes ago | parent

A 2% for every 50% increase is just insulting.

It might have made sense when they were valued at <100B.

At current 2T valuation it's basically saying "we'll throw some crumbs to the public if we control the world's economy".

At the very minimum the 2% should have doubled every time.

BrenBarn 37 minutes ago | parent

Just more self-serving hokum. If they really wanted to serve the public benefit they would just shut themselves down.

tedsanders 30 minutes ago | parent

Super cool! 5% of $1.5T is $75B (and 7% of $2.25T is $156B). When added to the ~15% already pledged by founders and employees, that's roughly $300B going to charity/public benefit, which roughly matches the OpenAI Foundation. Of course you can ask questions like why this amount or why this way, but I for one think it's fantastic for rich developers of new technology to share their surplus with the world. I hope their stockholders approve the donation.

kennywinker 23 minutes ago | parent

> going to charity/public benefit

Is it? Idk about previously committed money, but this sounds like it's going to an LLC that is owned and controlled by anthropic.

Afaik there's no formal constraint preventing them from spending 100% of this money on cool sports cars for anthropic execs. Even if it was committed to being spent on the "public good", that's the public good as decided by anthropic, not the public.

tedsanders 11 minutes ago | parent

Sure, there will always be some trust and interpretation involved. I'm sure whatever they spend it on will never satisfy everyone. But I'd rather criticize actual dishonesty and theft, not the specter of its potential. If they spend the money on cars for execs, I assume they'd open themselves up to lawsuits, hurt their image, and damage employee morale. Voting for an exec comp increase would be far less risky than fraud. I feel confident this announcement is genuine, but of course none of us can read minds.

Geezus_42 16 minutes ago | parent

That's a drop in the bucket and it will mostly be a make work program for their extended network of friends and family, like most charities.

herunan 20 minutes ago | parent

It feels disingenuous when a company attaches to market valuation the amount of public good they do. By that logic, they could say: "We didn't do well in the market, so we're not investing as much in making the world a better place."