Anthropic begin funding Blender as a Corporate Patron

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".