Netflix co-founder and executive chairman Reed Hastings has joined the board of Anthropic, the San Francisco AI company behind the Claude chatbot series, after being elected by the firm’s Long-Term Benefit Trust, a governance body charged with safeguarding the public interest as the start-up scales its technology.
Trust chair Buddy Shah said Hastings’ “leadership experience and commitment to addressing AI’s societal challenges” made him an ideal addition, while Hastings praised Anthropic’s focus on reliable, steerable models and vowed to “help humanity progress.” Anthropic executives Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei said the appointment deepens the board’s mix of operational and research expertise at a moment when the company is preparing its next-generation Claude 4.
Hastings spent 25 years as Netflix chief executive before handing control to Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters in January 2023, remaining executive chairman while expanding philanthropic work that includes a $50 million gift to Bowdoin College for an “AI and Humanity” initiative. The Silicon Valley veteran also sits on the boards of Microsoft and Bloomberg and has poured hundreds of millions into U.S. charter-school networks and digital-infrastructure projects in Africa.
Anthropic is one of the best-funded challengers to OpenAI, drawing a combined $6 billion from Amazon and Google over the past two years and securing a valuation reported near $18.4 billion in a Menlo Ventures-led round last December. Amazon, which has designated Anthropic a core partner for its Bedrock cloud service, can invest up to $4 billion and holds a minority stake that gives the e-commerce group preferred access to Claude models.
Those tie-ups are drawing fresh scrutiny in Washington: the Federal Trade Commission in January asked Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, OpenAI and Anthropic for details of their recent AI partnerships, part of a wider antitrust review of concentration in the generative-AI supply chain. Policy analysts told Reuters the addition of a high-profile independent director could help Anthropic demonstrate stronger oversight as regulators weigh whether cloud-vendor financing distorts competition.
Governance specialists note that Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust—designed to avoid the boardroom turbulence that roiled rival OpenAI in 2023—now counts five members, including venture capitalist Yasmin Razavi and Confluent co-founder Jay Kreps, giving the start-up a mix of media, cloud and entrepreneurial voices as it moves toward large-scale commercial deployment of Claude.