Anthropic hires a top Biden official to lead its new AI for social good team (exclusive)
Anthropic is turning to a Biden administration alum to run its new Beneficial Deployments team, which is tasked with helping extend the benefits of its AI to organizations focused on social good—particularly in areas like health research and education—that may lack market-driven incentives.
The new team will be led by Elizabeth Kelly, who in 2024 was tapped by the Biden administration to lead the U.S. AI Safety Institute within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Kelly helped form agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic that let NIST safety-test the companies' new models prior to their deployment. She left the government in early March, and in mid-March joined Anthropic.
'Our mission is to support the development and deployment of AI in ways that are good for the world but might not be incentivized by the market,' Kelly tells Fast Company.
Anthropic views the new group as a reflection of its mission as a public benefit corporation, which commits it to distribute the advantages of its AI equitably, not just to deep-pocketed corporations. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei emphasized in an essay he published last year AI's potential to drive progress in areas like life sciences, physical health, education, and poverty alleviation.
The Beneficial Deployments team sits within Anthropic's go-to-market organization, which it says ensures that the company's AI software and services are designed and deployed with customer needs in mind. Kelly says her team will collaborate across departments—including with Anthropic's Applied AI group and sciences and social impact specialists—to help mission-aligned customers build successful products and services powered by Anthropic models.
'We need to treat nonprofits, ed techs, health techs, those organizations that are developing really transformative solutions the same way that we treat our biggest enterprise customers,' Kelly says. In fact, the smaller organizations, which often lack budget and in-house AI expertise, may get a level of support that's not considered standard for Anthropic's larger customers.
'Our primary focus here is making sure that … the work that we're doing has the biggest impact in terms of lives that we're improving, diseases that we're curing, educational outcomes we're improving,' Kelly says. When considering new beneficiaries, Kelly says she'll take input from members of Anthropic's 'long-term benefit trust,' an independent governance body whose five trustees have experience in global development.
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