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RT Roberto Tallarita On The Lawfare Podcast

“Despite an A-plus in effort, I'm not reassured that this is going to work. If we are really worried, as they are, that this technology is the biggest threat we are facing as a society right now, I'm not reassured that corporate governance will take care of this risk.”

The Lawfare Podcast · Policy · November 2026

“Despite an A-plus in effort, I'm not reassured that this is going to work. If we are really worried, as they are, that this technology is the biggest threat we are facing as a society right now, I'm not reassured that corporate governance will take care of this risk.” — Roberto Tallarita, The Lawfare Podcast

Context

Tallarita had just said Anthropic's S-1 shows real thought about governance and is not a marketing ploy, and that it spends far more space on profit-versus-mission trade-offs than other public benefit corporations. He then gives his bottom line: sincere effort, but corporate governance may be the wrong tool for a risk of this size.

Transcript

The Lawfare Podcast Around 19:05 into the episode
Roberto Tallarita

…were about shareholders complaining that the boards care too little about them and about profit making. So, weren't really cases about enforcing the social, the social purpose, which is not surprising. That's what shareholders are there for. They're trying to make some money with this investment.

Kevin Frazier

But that's just such a great thing to point out, though, about this design of PBCs to begin with. The only people who can enforce it are most interested in one prong of the balancing.

Roberto Tallarita

…I mean, this is marketing, but I'm not sure. I mean, I have no insider information into the company, but I've, you know, reading the effort here and talking to people who have been closer to this effort, I'm pretty confident that they are sincerely trying to pull off this very difficult balance between purpose and profit. But the reality is that it's very, very hard. And I'm not very reassured. Despite an A-plus in effort, I'm not reassured that this is going to work. If we are really worried, as they are, that this technology is the biggest threat we are facing as a society right now, I'm not reassured that corporate governance will take care of this risk.

Kevin Frazier

So we know that there are certainly going to be shortcomings with a sort of corporate governance alone as the mechanism to avoid some of those worst case outcomes. And as you noted previously, boards traditionally have been thought of as having a hyper-focus on the financial interests. We mitigate…

Roberto Tallarita

So this is the most interesting and creative part of Anthropic's governance structure. But let me immediately say something that will, it's kind of surprising. And the long benefit trust is not 100% focused on safety. Even the trust has a triple mission, as it were. So it has to balance profit…

Kevin Frazier

And just to pause there for one second for the folks who don't read S1s for a living, right? This is the dual class structure, or I guess in this case, multi-class structure, whereas normally we would have one class of shares, every share would get one vote, and this is sort of the traditional. And…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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