New Anthropic Board Member Signals Healthcare Push - Forbes
So Anthropic, having spent the last few years lecturing everyone about the existential risks of AI and the need for 'safe' deployment, has decided the best way to keep humanity safe is to get into bed with Big Pharma. The company's Long-Term Benefit Trust—that delightful structure where directors have 'no financial stake' in Anthropic's success, which presumably means they're paid in moral superiority—has appointed Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to its board. This pushes the Trust-appointed directors past the 50% threshold, meaning the company is now technically more accountable to its mission than to its shareholders. How reassuring, especially when that mission apparently involves partnering with an industry whose track record on patient safety and pricing transparency is, shall we say, complicated.
Narasimhan's appointment is being framed as a 'healthcare push,' which in corporate doublespeak means Anthropic wants to sell its Claude models to hospitals, insurers, and drug companies. Because nothing says 'keeping AI safe' like embedding it in a sector where a single hallucination could mean a misdiagnosis, and where the profit motive has historically aligned so beautifully with ethical restraint. It's the same company that Steve Bannon praised for rejecting a Pentagon deal because it was too risky—apparently, weaponising AI is beyond the pale, but medicalising it is just prudent business. The cognitive dissonance is almost impressive.
This move also neatly illustrates the regulatory gap in AI governance: while everyone's busy worrying about killer robots and disinformation, the real action is in verticals like healthcare, where the stakes are immediate and the oversight is, at best, fragmented. The LTBT structure is supposed to be a safeguard, but putting a pharma CEO in charge of AI safety is like putting a fox in charge of henhouse security—he might not eat all the chickens, but he'll certainly have opinions on how they should be packaged and sold. One wonders if Narasimhan's first board meeting will include a presentation on how to maximise shareholder value while minimising liability, all in the name of 'long-term benefit.'