Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron (blender.org)

Any ideas why anthropic is interested in blender funding?

I can imagine they would be interested in creating features to generate 3d models.

That's already blowing up on Mastodon. Blenderartist silent for now. Won't stay like that for very long.

I wonder, if Ton was involved in that decision, or if it's only Francesco. Could turn out to be a very unlucky start into the leadership role.

I have mixed feeling about this. Guess they can need the money ... but still. Data goes to Anthropic here. It also will buy influence in some ways, I am sure about that. We could see this with rubygems.org - when shopify threatened to cut funding some months ago, suddenly chaos erupted. Money buys influence, this is easy to see how.

There will be community backlash. And it will not be uncalled for. Sad news.

> improve foundational features like the Blender Python API, which enables developers and artists alike

So they want claude to be able to talk to blender

So Claude will soon do 3D modelling?

I love blender. They should get all the money they need.

It's because LLMs will soon start building real-world objects via CAD. This is the first step. Look at things like the Adam plugin for Onshape. Works great with Opus. It built a toy car for me with one prompt.

I see we're now entering the "Sam Bankman-Fried" stage of buying goodwill.

Will Blender start allowing Anthropic to train on your art automatically unless you opt-out?

These AI companies need to be kept away from Open Source projects. A sad day for Blender :(

The press watching side of me only has questions. Why was this published by Blender and not Anthropic? What does this actually mean? That the blender team gets free claude code max subscriptions?

I prefer that outcome to them acquiring OSS projects and shutting them down once the bubble collapses.

Almost every AI lab I talk to that deals with 3D has built their pipelines around Blender.

This is unsurprising as a general development other than Anthropic doesn’t have a 3D model generation framework.

I don’t think this is to create MCP servers necessarily but rather to improve the blender pipeline further.

Can you imagine going to a football match and second-guessing which are the players who look human, but skin-deep are actually androids made at a factory? This is what it feels like with music and literature right now with so much AI. There are some pockets where you still can say "that's human-made", like 3D-rendered feature films with some particular artistic direction. That, it seems, AI companies also want it to go the way of the dodo.

I've been using Claude with OpenSCAD to generate some simple models with repetitive geometry (a set of d8 dice with braille on them for a scrabble-like game for blind children). It's really good, though often I have to send a screenshot to Claude or describe a geometry issue.

Having more native integration into Blender, which I'm already much more familiar with, will be fantastic.

Anthropic right now internally (probably):

“We love art :P”

Not sure why this is getting backlash. Just look at https://fund.blender.org. Other corporate sponsors are Google, Meta, Nvidia, Netflix, even Adidas.

This just means more support for a major OSS project.

Is this going to be another app that I have to make sure I opt-out of training for?

This will be a big step up from using python to generate shitty gifs

I hope this doesn't mean enshittification of Blender.

Ugh. I love Blender, it's the greatest software of all time according to myself, and I absolutely hate this and I am terrified at what it implies. If they just want name recognition ok fine, but my guess is Anthropic will want changes to Blender itself and I find that totally unacceptable.

Ah well, the online artist community is unusually principled on matters like this, especially compared to here. If they start doing shady stuff it will get forked and probably spell the end of the Blender foundation, which would still be really bad of course.

Sigh. Not a happy Tuesday.

it would be funny if this was meant as a goodwill gesture from anthropic to counter all the recent bad press, only for it to cause even more drama