Ben Bernanke ran the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis. Now he gets to advise an AI company that makes chatbots. This makes perfect sense if you've suffered a traumatic brain injury.
The guy who decided which banks lived and died will now weigh in on whether Claude should be slightly nicer when you ask it to write your cover letter. He joins Anthropic's independent trust, which means he advises leadership but owns zero equity. He works for free or close to it. The man who oversaw trillions in quantitative easing now clocks in to help a startup figure out if their language model is too mean to furries.
Members of this trust hold no stock. They just show up and give opinions. It's like being a dad at Thanksgiving except the turkey is artificial general intelligence and your kids might accidentally end it all.
Bernanke's entire career was reading economic data and deciding whether to push the money printer button. Now he'll read blog posts about AI safety and decide whether Anthropic should push the ChatGPT competitor button. The skills transfer perfectly if you squint hard enough to detach your retinas.
Retail traders will see this headline and immediately buy calls on whatever AI penny stock their cousin mentioned at a barbecue. They'll lose everything by Friday. Bernanke won't notice because he'll be in a conference room debating whether large language models need a discount window.
The appointment signals that Anthropic wants someone with regulatory credibility on speed dial when Congress eventually remembers AI exists. Smart play. Bernanke knows every senator over sixty by first name and can explain complex topics using only the word "transitory" until everyone gives up and votes yes.
He prevented the Great Depression 2.0 and got a Nobel for it. Now he prevents a chatbot from telling teenagers how to hotwire a Camry. What a f*cking victory lap.
Photo by Brecht Corbeel on Unsplash
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