After judging SpaceX to be an unacceptable governance risk, Anders Schelde says the $25 billion pension fund he oversees is ready to buy into Anthropic PBC’s IPO.

The artificial intelligence giant “is a completely different animal than SpaceX,” Schelde, the chief investment officer of Copenhagen-based AkademikerPension, said in an interview.

Schelde made headlines earlier this year, when he warned that Elon Musk’s near-absolute control of SpaceX created a “catastrophic governance structure.”Others including the New York City Comptroller Mark Levine subsequently made similar observations. The impression left was that the first mega IPO to offer investors direct exposure to an AI business ended as a flop with the sustainability crowd.

Investors focused on sustainability, a group that by some estimates represents about $17 trillion in assets, are trying to figure out how to approach AI’s seemingly huge environmental, social and governance risks. Anthropic may offer a more acceptable path for ESG-minded investors to get exposure to the AI boom than some of its competitors, according to Schelde.

Anthropic has designed its governance so that its seven co-founders and an independent trust retain control of the company after the IPO. The structure is supposed to allow Anthropic, which is listing as a public benefit corporation (PBC), to prioritize safety over short-term shareholder rewards. However, the board will set its own standards to determine what a successful public benefit mission looks like, according to its filing. A spokesperson for Anthropic didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Some sustainable investors, including Levine of the New York City pension funds, have criticized Anthropic’s governance structure as one that prevents regular shareholders from having influence. But Levine has also said that won’t stop the funds he oversees from being exposed to the company via indexes.

The majority control that Anthropic’s founders have isn’t ideal, Schelde said. “But we’re also flexible because we think it’s a process and it’s understandable that the founders would like to retain some sort of control.”In its Oct. 26 IPO filing, Anthropic said the AI it’s building may ultimately pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.”The company also used its S-1 filing to acknowledge it expects to face heightened scrutiny of how it tackles environmental and social tensions associated with the build-out of AI data centers.

Rather than being deal-breakers, such warnings serve to reassure investors that Anthropic and its chief executive, Dario Amodei, are approaching the risks ahead with an appropriate level of seriousness, Schelde said. “It’s very responsible, I think, to be so explicit.”AkademikerPension, which blacklisted SpaceX from both its passive and active funds, plans to hold Anthropic in the passive half of its portfolio.

It will then base any decision on whether to buy shares for its actively managed portfolio on the company’s valuation. Schelde said he’s aware of the risks associated with buying into the AI boom, amid a steady flow of warnings that the sector’s debt-fueled growth is unsustainable.

“In all likelihood this will end in a bubble,” he said. “The big question is the timing. And as we see it, it’s a little too early to call it a bubble.”Despite its comparatively small size, AkademikerPension has regularly drawn attention to itself for its investment decisions. It dumped its stake in Tesla Inc. last year, citing concerns that Musk was “in the process of destroying” the company’s brand and value. And in January, AkademikerPension said it was offloading Treasuries, based on its assessment that the US government is “not a good credit.”That move, announced in the middle of a tense standoff between Denmark and the US over Greenland, briefly contributed to a decline in US Treasuries.