The 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.
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ScottCarammell 11 hours ago
Quoting: Talon1024The Blender Foundation is getting absolutely roasted for accepting this "donation", and rightfully so!the alternative is to let those "people" keep the money I'm more than happy with them taking it so long as they're not beholden to anything they say
As an open source project, their ultimate goal should be to have a good feedback loop between their users and the developers. It even says, in enormous letters, on the front page of the Blender website:
It's about people.
Accepting this donation, from a company that represents everything wrong with the tech industry over the past 8 years, betrays that goal of having goodwill between the users and developers.
It would be wise for them to return the money, and deny any future donations from them, or any other company whose primary product is an AI or LLM.
mattaraxia 8 hours ago
Quoting: Johnologue"I don't know much about the commercial/licensed 3D modeling programs though, so I can't say I'd make a better comparison."Quoting: mattaraxiaIf you're them, having something like Blender, that collects no licenses, crush something like Unity, that does, is great.Unity isn't a 3D modeling application, it's a game engine. That would be if they were funding Godot.
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.
I don't know much about the commercial/licensed 3D modeling programs though, so I can't say I'd make a better comparison.
Anthropic supporting open projects when their whole thing is "AI can't be open because then crazy idiot hackers will end the world with magic computers" is hypocritical. If you look up "Anthropic open source" on DuckDuckGo, they have a program to let open source developers use their AI...the AI itself in that case is all gratis, no libre. They want to be in control.
Right. Unity is huge, it absolutely contains 3D modeling software, you sort of answer your own question there.
Blender used to be a game engine and a 3d modeling suite, but has gotten away from the game engine part. Unity used to be a game engine and has gotten more and more into being an all in one suite that includes 3d modeling.
I couldn't tell you how many Unity developers actually use it for their modeling, but absolutely Unity the company wants them to, funding Blender (and Godot) both would absolutely be seen as undermining them.
The tool is called ProBuilder and is absolutely part of Unity:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/[email protected]/manual/index.html
Quoting: williamjcmI find myself thinking that somewhere in the guts of the company someone said "You know, it's all gonna be over soon. But right now, we're still swimming in borrowed cash. What the heck, might as well send a little dribble of it over to Blender before the end."Quoting: STiATPocket money for an AI company."Pocket money" that they pretty much can't afford to spend because they're not profitable in the slightest.
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 29 Apr 2026 at 11:35 pm UTC
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