On Monday, Elon Musk pledged that, the following year, he would bestow upon “every kid in America” a single share of his company SpaceX.

The offer materialised a day after the artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced, in a social media post, that it would commit 5% of its shares to a new “public benefit” fund.

In riposte to that Sunday post, Musk wrote, “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public.”

SpaceX's shares, with the company slated to disclose its quarterly earnings on Tuesday, concluded Friday's trading at $146.03.

Given that the United States is home to approximately 73 million children under the age of 18, Musk's pledge would thereby be valued at roughly $10.66 billion.

Anthropic announced on Sunday that the shares it is committing will be allocated to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a newly established entity within the company.

The fund’s value stands to appreciate potentially as the shares increase in worth.

Musk refrained from furnishing further particulars as to how his share pledge would be executed, though he did append in his post that “This will be the first of many.”

The announcements by Musk and Anthropic emerge at a juncture when Americans are growing ever more apprehensive about AI.

A recent poll conducted by the Reporters-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research reveals that a majority of Americans—64%—believe AI is advancing "too fast," whereas 27% consider its development to have been "about right" and a mere 8% contend that it is progressing "too slow."

Last month, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Musk of SpaceXAI and other prominent industry leaders asserted that AI’s development must be slowed.

That consensus emerged after an Anthropic researcher resigned with a dire warning about the threats the technology poses to humanity.

Yet obstacles—among them domestic and global competition, profit motivations and pushback from President Donald Trump—all stand in the way of a coordinated effort to pace AI’s development.

Musk has quietly emerged as the largest known donor in this year’s midterm elections, disbursing upwards of $276 million since July in an effort to preserve Republican majorities in Congress.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and the company’s five other cofounders established Anthropic as a public benefit corporation, a designation that for-profit companies elect in order to reconcile financial objectives with social impact.

Anthropic is contemplating a colossal initial public offering as early as November.

In June the company stated that it had lodged a confidential filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission pertaining to its proposed IPO.

That same month, Musk’s SpaceX made its Wall Street debut as a publicly traded company, thereby rendering Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

Shares of SpaceX have nonetheless fallen 35.3% since peaking days after that initial public offering, which means Musk is a billionaire.