Support us on Patreon
PayPalThe Blender Foundation announced today that Anthropic (the AI company) have begun funding them, joining up as a Corporate Patron.
For those who somehow don't know what Blender is - it's the world's most popular free and open-source 3D creation software. It's filled full of features for modelling, animation, VFX, and more. It's used for video games, movies and so on.
Being a Corporate Patron means Anthropic will donate at least €240k a year to Blender. Anthropic join the likes of Epic Games, Netflix, Wacom, Pico XR, Aras Pranckevičius and Bolt Graphics at the same funding level.
Since Anthropic are an AI company though, no doubt some people will feel this is a bit (for lack of a better word right now) - icky. But, funding Blender doesn't mean they get a say in anything. Blender is entirely free and open source, and Blender as a whole benefits from lots of different organisations and companies donating to it.
From the Blender press release:
In these uncertain and divisive times, we appreciate Anthropic offering support to the Blender project in the form of a Patron-level membership. This enables the Blender team to keep pursuing projects independently, and to focus on building tools for artists and creators.
Francesco Siddi, CEO at Blender
The Blender team make it clear that this money goes towards "Blender core development, to maintain and continuously improve foundational features like the Blender Python API, which enables developers and artists alike to extend and improve the software for custom workflows".
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
See more from me
You can also find comments for this article on social media: 
AllyTheProtogen 2 hours ago
I wonder what it is that they're getting at here.People use Blender to make creative stuff. They need the creative stuff to feed their models?
Either that or the PR department had money to burn, looked at the list of previous sponsors and felt excluded?
mattaraxia 1 hour ago
Quoting: AllyTheProtogenI wonder what it is that they're getting at here. If I had to guess, they're bleeding money into the red like every other AI company, so wtf is up with sending out even more? And to Blender of all things?? Seeing how they're amoral enough to support AI in the first place, I highly doubt they're doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.I suspect it makes sense in a sort of complicated way, it's fraught, sort of a my enemy's enemy thing from the POV of an open source project.
What Anthropic wants, is to be the tool for all development everywhere.
If you're them, having something like Blender, that collects no licenses, crush something like Unity, that does, is great.
Because then the money shops were spending on Unity . . . goes to agents instead. See they weirdly want all royalty free development platforms too, just . . . maybe not for good reasons . . .
They may also just be burning cash at an absurd rate and want their logo out there, it's just marketing. They think it will create goodwill with people who will become customers.
Caldathras 33 minutes ago
Quoting: mattaraxiaThey think it will create goodwill with people who will become customers.I think that this sums up the "why" quite nicely.
They probably spend more than that on espresso capsules.
How to setup OpenMW for modern Morrowind on Linux / SteamOS and Steam Deck
How to install Hollow Knight: Silksong mods on Linux, SteamOS and Steam Deck