Available to Vote

The position I want in philanthropy is not donor. Too expensive.

I would like to vote the shares after somebody else has given them away. The charity gets an asset. The donor gets to have done something generous. I get a reason to attend the shareholders’ meeting. Of the three jobs, mine seems to offer the least conflict with my present resources.

Cristian Dina’s October 30 report in The Next Web describes such an arrangement at Anthropic, the company behind Claude. According to the company’s IPO filing as reported by Dina, two charitable funds, Daffy Charitable Fund and Dechomai Asset Trust, receive donations of Anthropic shares. Dario Amodei holds irrevocable proxies to vote those shares: 4,621,120 at the time of the filing. Shares donated by Amodei himself or his family are excluded from this arrangement.

That exclusion is worth reading twice. These are not his own gifts coming back to sit obediently beside him. Other people can give shares to charity, and he can acquire the right to speak for the shares.

Not the right to spend the charity’s money. Not ownership of the gift. A vote in the company. I am interested in that particular part of the property, which can be separated from the part that pays.

If I were rich, I expect I would find this separation inconvenient when applied to me and ingenious when applied to someone else. I could surrender a financial interest and still have things to say about how the business should be run. Surely the money was the sacrifice. Why should my excellent judgment have to leave with it?

But here I wouldn’t even have to make that sacrifice. I could encourage the generosity of my colleagues. A fine thing you are doing. Admirable. Let us get the paperwork right.

Robert Frank’s October 29 reporting for CNBC describes master donation agreements through which the two funds receive shares from the company or its employees. He also reports a reasonable defence of restrictions on donated stock. Adam Nash, Daffy’s chief executive, says conditions involving voting rights are fairly common for gifts of private stock. He doesn’t comment on Anthropic specifically. He says gifts must be irrevocable and the nonprofit must retain ultimate control of the investment within the restrictions.

So the charity can receive a real gift. This needn’t be imaginary generosity. If the asset becomes valuable, it can be valuable to people other than the person who earned or bought it. I have no wish to send useful money back because I dislike the arrangements under which it arrived.

I would, however, like to keep reading the arrangements.

In the same filing, Dina reports, Anthropic describes the seven co-founders’ separate pledges to dedicate eighty percent of their personal equity to philanthropic causes. It calls those commitments “voluntary, revocable expressions of each co-founder’s philanthropic intent” that aren’t legally binding. The timing, amounts and recipients remain uncertain.

These are different piles of shares. The founders’ promises are revocable. The voting proxies over the specified charitable holdings are irrevocable. This does not mean Amodei can retrieve a completed charitable gift. Nor does it establish that he or the other founders won’t honour their promises. A man can intend to give something and then give it. He can do it without a court officer standing beside the cheque.

But I notice how much easier I find it to imagine the future gift than the present vote. Eighty percent is a magnificent thing to picture leaving a fortune. I can almost see the departing money. Four million and some shares being voted under a proxy doesn’t furnish the same picture. No grateful face. No large amount written across a ceremonial cheque. Somebody has authority to answer when those shares are asked a question.

I would like to be that somebody.

In the company I am imagining for myself, the charities might vote exactly as I would. Perhaps they would be pleased to leave it to me. A proxy isn’t proof that somebody has been overruled. The attraction, from where I am sitting, is not having to depend on our continuing agreement. We could differ, and I would still have the voting authority the arrangement gave me.

I have no grounds to call the reported proxies control of Anthropic as a whole. A block of votes isn’t every vote. It is enough to notice which direction this block has travelled while the shares themselves have travelled to charity.

I could be very enthusiastic about the giving. I could give interviews about it. All those useful things being done, all those colleagues deciding that money isn’t everything. I would mean what I said. I would also know that, when the meeting came, enthusiasm was not the instrument I needed to bring.

The gift belongs to the charity. If it has something to say at the shareholders’ meeting, I am available.

Additional reporting: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei charts a new direction for tech philanthropy (Robert Frank, October 29, 2026).

Source: Anthropic spent $2.75m guarding Dario Amodei, four times his salary (Cristian Dina, October 30, 2026).