Blender change the Anthropic AI funding deal, with discussions planned for AI Policies

After quite a lot of backlash following the Blender announcement that Anthropic would become a Corporate Sponsor, the Blender Foundation released a statement from Francesco Siddi, the Chairman of the Blender Foundation.

Siddi explains that Anthropic will no longer become a full sponsor, instead the funding will be given to the Blender Foundation as a plain single donation all at once. So Blender will still receive a funding boost, without Anthropic's name being attached to them in any way it seems. They said that "Anthropic has been informed and supports this decision" noting that "Like all Blender donations, it will be spent on core activities for the Blender project, supporting human-driven development, art, and creativity".

There will be some changes coming after this. Siddi noted the Blender Foundation will be "strengthening the processes when it comes to accepting donations, aligned with the existing Funding Policy". And that they "need to urgently tackle the topic and clearly define how Blender is positioned in regards to generative AI technologies when it comes to the product, software development, documentation, and other activities".

So eventually, they may have some more full formal policies when it comes to AI. Something they probably should have had already, especially before accepting any funding from an AI company. But the statement was clear that "No generative AI functionality is currently available or planned to be integrated in Blender" in case people were at all worried about it.

Hopefully something actually good will come out of all this in the end.