A Harvard Law paper analyzes three companies that installed investor-overriding mission guardians in a for-profit structure: Ben & Jerry’s ended in spectacular failure, OpenAI already experienced a governance meltdown and is restructuring as a public benefit corporation, while Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on Monday. The paper by Jesse Fried and Idan Reiter examines the “Ben & Jerry’s risk,” the danger that mission guardians will harm investors while achieving the exact opposite of their intended goals. Anthropic differs by including a “kill switch” allowing investors to remove the Long-Term Benefit Trust and its appointed directors, which the authors consider the only potentially workable arrangement among the three. OpenAI, whose structure remains contested ahead of its expected IPO, removed the word “safely” from its mission statement during its October 2025 restructuring.
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