Tom Brown (Anthropic)
American AI engineer; co-founder and chief compute officer of Anthropic
| Tom Brown
| |
|---|---|
| Born | 1987 (Forbes) |
| Nationality | American |
| Residence | San Francisco, California (Forbes) |
| Occupation | AI engineer |
| Known for | Lead author of the GPT-3 paper; co-founder of Anthropic |
| Education | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MEng, computer science) |
Tom Brown (born 1987) is an American artificial intelligence engineer. He is co-founder and chief compute officer of Anthropic, in charge of securing, scaling and using the company's computing resources.[1][2] On 10 November 2026 the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list ranked Brown 215th in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$13.8 billion; Forbes lists the source of wealth as artificial intelligence.[1][3] In the annual World's Billionaires list published in 2026, Forbes had ranked Brown 567th, at US$7.0 billion.[4] At OpenAI he led the engineering of GPT-3 and was first author of the 2020 paper that introduced it.[2][5] The amended registration statement of 10 November 2026 showed him as the beneficial owner of 244,173,040 Class A shares, the most of any co-founder apart from Dario Amodei's total including proxy shares.[2]
Education and early career
Brown studied computer science and cognitive science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Anthropic says he holds an MEng in computer science from MIT.[1][2] Forbes says he co-founded his first company, the social club Grouper, in 2011.[1]
OpenAI
Anthropic's filing says Brown led the engineering of GPT-3 at OpenAI and co-invented deep RLHF with Dario Amodei. It credits the technique with turning base language models into conversational assistants such as Claude.[2] He was first author of Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (2020), which introduced GPT-3, a 175-billion-parameter model.[5] He was also an author of Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models (2020) and Constitutional AI (2022).[6][7]
Anthropic
Brown co-founded Anthropic in January 2021. As chief compute officer he leads the technical organisation that secures, scales and uses its computing resources.[2]
Listing and ownership
Anthropic filed to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol "ANT", with an indicated price range of US$70–78 a share in its 10 November 2026 amended filing. It said that the seven co-founders had each pledged to give 80% of their personal Anthropic equity to philanthropy, describing the pledges as voluntary and revocable rather than legally binding.[2] A single Class F share held by a founders' LLC will carry 50.1% of the votes.[2] TechCrunch reported that each co-founder would sell 3,378,378 shares in the offering, worth just under US$250 million each at the midpoint of the range.[8] Fortune estimated that each co-founder owned about 1.4% of the company on a fully diluted basis.[9]
Political activity
In the 2022–2026 cycles, Brown's itemised federal contributions included US$250,000 to SLF PAC on 30 September 2026, US$3,500 to the Cotton Majority Committee and, in 2022, US$2,900 to Carrick Flynn for Oregon.[10]
Across the 3 non-memo records retrieved for the 2022–2026 cycles, the filtered total is US$256,400 (a lower bound). The largest recipient committees, as named in the filings, were SLF PAC (US$250,000), COTTON MAJORITY COMMITTEE (US$3,500), CARRICK FLYNN FOR OREGON (US$2,900).[10]
| Cycle | Total (US$, lower bound) | Records | Largest recipient committees (as filed with the FEC) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | $2,900 | 1 | CARRICK FLYNN FOR OREGON ($2,900) |
| 2026 | $253,500 | 2 | SLF PAC ($250,000); COTTON MAJORITY COMMITTEE ($3,500) |
Philanthropy
Like the other co-founders, Brown has pledged to give 80% of his personal Anthropic equity to philanthropy. Anthropic describes this as a voluntary and revocable commitment.[2]
Wealth
Forbes classes Brown as self-made, with wealth from artificial intelligence.[1]
Wealth history
Forbes has included this entry in its annual World's Billionaires list in 2 of the editions from 2001 to 2026 checked for this profile, starting with 2025. The table gives the rank and estimated net worth in each annual list, and, where applicable, the rank and estimate in the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans.[4][1]
| Year | World's Billionaires rank | Net worth (US$ bn) | Forbes 400 rank | Forbes 400 net worth (US$ bn) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 2623 | 1.2 | – | – |
| 2026 | 567 | 7.0 | 75 | 15.5 |
International and political links
This section uses the same ten headings for every profile in this series. Only specific, sourced actions are included; company-level and foundation-level actions are labelled as such. Where nothing was found, the entry reads "No documented involvement found in sources checked."
Israel (investments, operations, donations, contracts, statements)
No documented involvement found in sources checked.
Zionist or pro-Israel organisations and lobbying groups
No documented involvement found in sources checked.
Jewish communal charities
No documented involvement found in sources checked.
Gulf states
No documented involvement found in sources checked.
China
No documented involvement found in sources checked.
Russia
No documented involvement found in sources checked.
India
No documented involvement found in sources checked.
Palestinian or Arab causes
No documented involvement found in sources checked.
Home government
Anthropic's filing says that in February 2026, after the company stated that its technology should not be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, the President directed federal agencies to stop using it and the Secretary of War ordered it designated a "supply-chain risk to national security". A federal district court in California largely granted Anthropic summary judgment on 27 August 2026, but on 25 September 2026 a divided D.C. Circuit panel upheld one of the designations. Anthropic has asked for a rehearing by the full court.[2]
Other international links
No documented involvement found in sources checked.
See also
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Forbes, Forbes profile record for Tom Brown (Forbes data feed behind forbes.com/profile/tom-brown/) Forbes, live record, read 10 November 2026, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 Anthropic, PBC, Form S-1/A (Amendment No. 2) registration statement U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 10 November 2026, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ Forbes, Forbes Real-Time Billionaires data feed Forbes, live; downloaded 10 November 2026 23:28 UTC, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Forbes, Forbes World's Billionaires list data feed, annual editions 2001–2026 (one file per year at this path with the year substituted; all 26 files downloaded and read) Forbes, annual lists; downloaded 20 October 2026, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Tom B. Brown et al., Language Models are Few-Shot Learners arXiv:2005.14165, 28 May 2020, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ Jared Kaplan et al., Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models arXiv:2001.08361, 23 January 2020, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ Yuntao Bai et al., Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback arXiv:2212.08073, 15 December 2022, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ Julie Bort, All 7 Anthropic founders will each cash out about $250M in IPO TechCrunch, 10 November 2026, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ Nick Lichtenberg, Anthropic’s 7 cofounders are each worth $14 billion already—and that could double in an IPO. They’ve promised to give most of it away Fortune, 26 October 2026, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 U.S. Federal Election Commission, OpenFEC Schedule A (itemised individual contributions) query, contributor name "BROWN, TOM"; 2026 cycle shown in link, the 2022, 2024 and 2026 cycles were queried together with the same parameters; top 100 records by amount; records filtered by employer/occupation and name, memo entries excluded U.S. Federal Election Commission, data as filed; queried 10 November 2026, accessed 10 November 2026.