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
idk why i like when Corporations donate/contribute to open source projects .
Remember, guys; being a patron of an open source project is not the same as being an investor at a company.
Discussion on Blender Artists forum. If you want extra cortisol today.
edit:
My prediction… their 2026 financial report gonna see a huge drop for small donation from individuals.For anyone worried Blender is not only open source but the foundation is nonprofit and open of how their funding works.
Meaning you can code audit Blender to see if Claude is getting in it but you can indeed follow the money and see what the foundation is spending corporate donors on
Claude is already there, has been for a while.
The question now is the Claude Code Gen AI type situation or core code to work
FOSS users:
Big tech leeches off FOSS and never gives back!
Also FOSS users:
These big tech companies should stay out of our favorite projects, thei money is poison!
And this is why we can’t have nice things.
Well yeah, capitalists playbook.
Give money to thing, people who do thing are grateful but wary. People who do thing are able to do more thing with the money and become reliant on the money, then corporation starts putting the lean on them to push agenda while threatening to pull funding that the thing needs now.
They support well established projects and foundations that broke the corporate glass to push their agenda on those projects but not single user projects that they use in their closed source software.
Blender will be fine. They can’t make changes without going through pull requests and audits. At most, you might see some kind of Claude add-on. Totally opt-in.
…Until we’re convinced otherwise, of course.
I think it’s more worrying that Blender has been merging Claude code for a while now. Maybe Anthropic is going to give main devs free tokens now to incentivate the use.
It will continue to happen and every piece of software you use will contain generated code in the next decade.
Lol I love how these confident comments about how “AI is the future so get used to it” always get ratio’d because it really shows how delusional people like you are.
Most people are not brainwashed about this like you are.
I wonder if Blender’s actually received any actual real money from Anthropic, or if its just like, money hasn’t actually changed hands yet.
I know its not uncommon for big open source projects to accept money and sponsorships from corporations, but idk where Anthropic would really get the cash to even do this. AFAIK they’re still staying afloat on investor cash and are burning way more money running models than they can realistically charge people to use them.
This is the other reason Blender should steer clear of Anthropic.
AI is a bullshit industry that isn’t profitable and it is all going to collapse sooner or later, Blender should pursue sponsors that are actual profitable businesses that will be around in 5 years.
As a man of wealth and taste, I am also interested in sponsoring Blender.
a man of wealth and taste
What’s puzzling me is the nature of their game… (Cit.)
I hope you guessed their name.
Welp, that’s Blender fucked then. It’s just a matter of time.
You know a bunch of other companies you may dislike also fund blender too, right?
How many of them are known to make a tool that ruins everything it touches?
I looked up the list and laughed. A lot.
Doesn’t sound that bad, does it?
A lot of open source projects take money from companies to develop their stuff.
It’s not like Blender is forced to integrate AI now.
I think this is a net good.
I may just be being overly cynical, but once big corporations start giving money to these kinds of things, it’s not a big stretch for them to start influencing things in their favour for their money. I hope I’m wrong.
I hope you’re wrong too!
I believe projects are not all the same. Some projects might be quick to bend the knee, but others would never.
Depends how the Blender team works I guess :)
It is FOSS, so if it takes a turn to the worse I am sure they will be forked quickly 😄
I am sure they will be forked quickly
ooh-err Missus!
Bro how do you think Blender has been getting money all this time?
I haven’t really been keeping abreast of the situation. I’m only going by a gut reaction to this article. I’m happy to be proven wrong about this.
They are sponsored by major corps like nvidia, meta,amd. Despite this they’ve continued to put out a good Foss product. I think they’ll resist undue influence from antropic.
But I do think they’ll integrate ai inas they’re working on that at the moment.
Fucking disappointing as hell, Blender has so much potential and getting side tracked into useless AI crap will be a massive drain on productivity and improvement on the core Blender software.
It’s not like Blender is forced to integrate AI now.
from anthropic’s announcement: “The Blender developers have created an MCP connector, which is now officially available for Claude.”
MCP stands for “modern context protocol” and is a tech developed by anthropic for ai integration. in effect, yes, blender is forced to integrate ai. not claude specifically, mind you, but still.
It’s ’model complex protocol’ and you can’t stop people from making them to integrate with software. Basically you can create instructions so that the agent can use other software. I bet even w/o entropic there are already more than one on GitHub.
It blew my mind when I played with the godot mcps for the first time not gonna lie.
Okay, but how bad is that?
It is just an interface, or am i missing something here?
Anthropic has no control over the project.
They sponsored a feature that is still open to anyone to use or not use.
The project is intact for all I can tell?
Think about MCPs as an API for AI. It’s just an interface that let’s AI do a set of predetermined tasks/configurations. It’ll very likely be used for model generation via a prompt
They just partnered with Adobe. I have mixed feelings about this, as someone working in the creative industries. I have used AI to do some amazing things, and recently figured out how to use Claude to automate some boring, non-creative and time-consuming worklflows. This all, in theory is freeing me up to spend more time on the fun creative stuff, the problem is that nobody values creativity any more because they can just outsource that to AI.
This was never about bots being able to make art, they can’t, they can only steal it from humans and throw it into a woodchipper and then try to duct tape it back together.
This was about dehumanizing human artists and I am INCREDIBLY unimpressed by how so many artists have leaned into this dehumanization without any reflection over whether this is actually a future or just a way to permanently reduce the quality of life of digital human artists by culturally associating them with algorithmic robots even though the human output is 1000% more creative.
/me checks the date, notes this was not posted on the first, and searched “Blender Alternative.”
What the Adobe, you dipshits?
Blender is great software that makes 3d modeling accessible to a lot more people. Why would you need an alternative because Anthropic donates money to it?
It isn’t about there being any contact at all, it is about the inherent corrupting nature of money. If they become a corporate patron they are paying money to the Blender Foundation who can then use that funding to hire people to work on Blender. This all seems cool and normal.
The problem is not with getting the funding. The problem is once you have the funding you don’t want to lose it. That means you will be more likely to tweak things a little, embrace things that suit your corporate patrons, and not block features your community doesn’t want. For example, AI.
So if I make a prediction about this it isn’t that tomorrow Blender will have AI tools integrated throughout the whole stack. It is that over time, especially a year or more from now, AI related tools will come to Blender and they will be Anthropic based tools.
Will they be required? No, of course not. But they will be there and they will be opt out. And along with that the development of other tools which would have filled the niche the Anthropic tools have taken over will not be developed. So less work will go into something that an Anthropic tool could do instead.
It isn’t malice, it isn’t direct evil, but it will give Anthropic a quick leg up to getting all the graphic artists and modelers to use their tools rather than a competitors, and they can do it all while looking good.
The same thing happened with computers for schools. If kids grow up using Apple computers they buy them as adults and take those skills into their careers. If they instead learn on Windows machines then they take those skills forward. The whole industry is shaped by these choices and that locks in massive profits for those companies. Why do you think Google worked so hard on Chromebooks?
I would prefer for none of my apps to use the plagiarism machines in any way. I would prefer that any AI “enhancement” was a plugin I could easily install but not installed by default. But I am not going to get that, so it is disappointing.
I think the main counter argument to this is a practical one. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, all these greedy corporations have contributed to many open source projects and initiatives. Google has a strong influence in defining web standards, should we ditch web browsing? Amazon and even Microsoft have contributed to Linux either trough donations or direct contributions, both in the kernel and in foundational software that runs on top of it. Should we ditch using Linux servers?
What shows is that while money can corrupt it is not an inevitability. So instead of ditching Blender because Anthropic donates to it I’d suggest ditching Blender only if and when they start rolling out vendor-locked Antrophoc AI integrations rather than take a dogmatic ai company = bad stance.
I agree, I didn’t say with clarity that the reason for the worry is the above. I worry things will work out that way and AI companies are the absolute worst offenders for screwing everyone over constantly so it seems more likely with them than another company.
That said, Blender wouldn’t be where it is without contributions from various companies that drove features forward and made contributions to it. I do worry about the future, but I feel that way about most tech, the average person does not benefit from DRM at all but Linux supports it to some degree. I can remove support if I want and there are distros that support that, but in a world with corporate control as law I guess this is the best we can hope for for now.
So was Adobe, back when I used CS10
Eh, after reading this comment and looking on their website, it’s not really worse than before.
