Anthropic has named Christopher Stubbs, a Harvard University astrophysicist, to its Long-Term Benefit Trust. The trust has the power to elect a majority of the AI company’s board, an unusual corporate governance arrangement that is likely to come under increased pressure if the company goes public, as it is widely expected to do as soon as next month.
Stubbs’s appointment fills one of two open seats on the Trust. He is best known for his work showing that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, a counterintuitive finding that scientists speculate is the result of a previously undocumented force known as “dark energy.” Stubbs later headed the ESSENCE supernova cosmology project which gathered further evidence on the nature of dark energy. In 2015, Stubbs and other members of the High-Z Supernova Search Team, which had made the original dark energy findings, were awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
Stubbs was also the first project scientist for what is now the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which began a decade-long survey of the southern sky this past summer. In addition to being a professor, he was Harvard University’s Dean of Science from 2018 to 2024. And he serves as a member of JASON, the independent group of scientists that advises the U.S. government on defense and technology.
