THE QUIET OWNERS OF THE FUTURE

How the future of artificial intelligence came to be controlled by some of the world's least transparent institutions

- By PALAK SHAH

ANTHROPIC’S SUCCESS does not mean it will only answer your questions: but the AI tool stands to be the most powerful mediator of decision on earth.

Starting from which schools students apply to, medicines that patients must trust, legal arguments lawyers make and the governments that citizens should believe, artificial intelligence (AI) could rapidly be the layer between human beings and reality itself. Yet almost nobody knows who owns it.

On 22 March, 2024, a filing landed in a Delaware bankruptcy court that most people never read. It concerned the estate of FTX — the collapsed crypto exchange whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was by then awaiting sentencing for one of the largest financial frauds in American history. The filing listed the buyers for FTX’s most valuable remaining asset: a roughly eight per cent stake in Anthropic, the AI company founded by former OpenAI researchers and widely considered one of the two most consequential artificial intelligence laboratories in the world.

Buried in the list of nearly two dozen buyers were two names that, placed side by side, should have stopped every technology and financial journalist in their tracks:

Jane Street. Ford Foundation.

One is the world’s most profitable and most secretive trading firm, founded by a man with no public photograph, outed by India’s market regulator the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) as the biggest market manipulator.

Jane Street is currently also named in an 83-page US federal complaint alleging it used insider information to front-run the $40 billion collapse of a cryptocurrency that helped bring down FTX itself. The other is the United States’ most powerful private foundation, with $16 billion in assets, a documented history as a conduit for CIA soft power during the Cold War, and a record of controversy in India so severe that the Modi government placed it under enhanced national security scrutiny.