I had to read this twice to understand what they're actually proposing here. The entire premise behind AI is that it can amplify (and in some cases) replace human workers. The blog seems completely backwards to what they're advertising to the enterprise in sales.
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After more reading I find this really funny: "Enforcement and regulatory authority with teeth. The government should be able to block or deter the deployment of models that pose a significant risk of catastrophic harm. We must also avoid overly broad or heavy-handed regulatory power. Our framework proposes both a mechanism for blocking dangerous deployments, and concrete safeguards that would prevent that power from being misused. Policymakers could begin with a lighter-touch approach, then adapt this as model capabilities advance and the evaluation ecosystem matures." (They link to https://www.anthropic.com/policy-on-the-ai-exponential in this blog post)
Claude Corps, Forward Deployed Engineers, Strategic Token Reserves… what’s with all these military inspired naming conventions in AI? We’re just typing softly on keyboards…
This is an avenue I think will eventually be tried as a monetisation path: Models that are fully unavailable to company outsiders, you can just hire consultants that will be thin layers to the model. That way the costs that will come are more palatable since you pay for a hired person rather than a product/service.
I guess this is no different than Google Summer of Code, Code for America, etc but with AI. If it actually helps these orgs and doesn't lock them into Anthropic pricing/models then sure, let it rip.
It is completely different then Google Summer of Code used to be. Google Summer of Code was not about selling google products and making organizations dependent on them.
This is pretty much opposite Google Summer of Code.
Well played, Anthropic.
- Nvidia gives AI labs money to run their models.
- AI labs give money to AI engineers to use the models.
- Companies are getting hooked on AI products.
- AI engineers are getting hooked on AI products.
- Regular Software Engineers are getting devalued/replaced by low-skill AI engineers.
- Their employers get more money to spend on AI.
> CodePath, an Anthropic nonprofit partner and America’s largest provider of collegiate computer science education, will act as the fellows’ official employer of record and lead programming during the fellowship.
So your job is to be an FDE to sell Claude into non-profits.... but without ever actually working for Anthropic.
I mean some of the orgs could be like that, but the one near me I looked up (Durham, not affiliated to be clear), is more like an entry level gig to work on various projects (so you work for non-profit, but the orgs they work for may be public or private sector).
They mostly built phone apps oriented to public good projects. (So would just be using Claude Code to build the app itself, they wouldn't be calling Anthropic APIs behind the scenes, at least for those projects.)
Think $85k for an entry level gig subsidized by Anthropic. What is so bad about that?
This seems like one way to saddle nonprofits with functional, but potentially very expensive systems, set up by someone who helps them for a year then disappears and leaves them with no expertise to do long-term cost control or functionality improvements.
Neat throwback to Google Summer of Code, when tech felt so much simpler (at least to me). Anyone know anything about CodePath, Social Finance, or the nonprofits listed?
A lot of nonprofits could benefit from someone helping them implement AI and most are 1) competent enough to ensure the fellow hands off their projects before they leave, and 2) to decide if it’s worth continuing to pay for Claude or not.
It’s great the fellows are paid so they are at least somewhat accountable vs volunteers who are often unreliable.
All that said, I bet 80% of what these fellows end up doing is automating fundraising emails…
> We are not seeking job displacement. We are working to prevent or minimize it. Some amount of displacement, though we cannot say how much, may be an intrinsic consequence of the technology, and our responsibility is to prepare for it and respond to it. That is what this framework is for.
> Whatever happens, we are on the side of people. We are trying to solve these problems. We take no satisfaction in contributing to them, and we are not working to make them more likely.
The cognitive dissonance/doublespeak/hypocrisy (pick one) is absolutely insane.
They are concurrently:
1. creating and marketing products that are explicitly trying to automate, if not entire professions, at least big parts of them
2. edicting grand policy plans to limit the impact of massive job displacement that their products might cause
3. directly funding and coordinating missionary-type activities ("it's for a greater cause") to evangelize and propagate said products in areas of the economy that are usually underfunded and where job security is already quite bad (non-profits, NGOs)
So what do you want them to do, then? Because I don't like it either, but they're right about their core tenet, which is that if they don't do it, someone else is going to. Even if we ignore the obvious other player in OpenAI, there's now dozens of labs in a handful of countries, the cat is thoroughly out of the bag.
Is it annoying? Yeah. Is it preachy and hypocritical? Yeah. And I've yet to hear anyone suggest something better.
I don't understand this at a high level. Anthropic is going to go public, which means they are liable to act in the best interest of shareholders, so they cannot leave money on the table, much less do selfless handouts.
Yet at the same time, they are a public benefit corporation, and I'm not quite sure what that means? Is that a separate legal entity from the for-profit arm?
> economy that are usually underfunded and where job security is already quite bad (non-profits, NGOs)
If it works, using AI to cut jobs in the non-profit sector would be a good thing. Those jobs are overhead (necessary overhead, but overhead nonetheless) that reduces how much donor money actually makes it to the people it’s supposed to help. If AI can eliminate those jobs, that means a larger share of money that’s donated will actually get used for providing services.
KMPG and Palantir already use the FDE playbook to great success. And we've all found value in a free 12-month vendor trial, with no obligation to commit.
No idea what the fuss is about.
All non-profits need to do is demand model-agnostic deliverables, insist on handoff documentation, and budget for switching costs before the year ends.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 65.7 ms ] thread-- edit --
After more reading I find this really funny: "Enforcement and regulatory authority with teeth. The government should be able to block or deter the deployment of models that pose a significant risk of catastrophic harm. We must also avoid overly broad or heavy-handed regulatory power. Our framework proposes both a mechanism for blocking dangerous deployments, and concrete safeguards that would prevent that power from being misused. Policymakers could begin with a lighter-touch approach, then adapt this as model capabilities advance and the evaluation ecosystem matures." (They link to https://www.anthropic.com/policy-on-the-ai-exponential in this blog post)
From what I've gathered,, one thing the higher education system is good at is using GenAI to automate personal labor :)
This is pretty much opposite Google Summer of Code.
So your job is to be an FDE to sell Claude into non-profits.... but without ever actually working for Anthropic.
They mostly built phone apps oriented to public good projects. (So would just be using Claude Code to build the app itself, they wouldn't be calling Anthropic APIs behind the scenes, at least for those projects.)
Think $85k for an entry level gig subsidized by Anthropic. What is so bad about that?
alright
A lot of nonprofits could benefit from someone helping them implement AI and most are 1) competent enough to ensure the fellow hands off their projects before they leave, and 2) to decide if it’s worth continuing to pay for Claude or not.
It’s great the fellows are paid so they are at least somewhat accountable vs volunteers who are often unreliable.
All that said, I bet 80% of what these fellows end up doing is automating fundraising emails…
> We are not seeking job displacement. We are working to prevent or minimize it. Some amount of displacement, though we cannot say how much, may be an intrinsic consequence of the technology, and our responsibility is to prepare for it and respond to it. That is what this framework is for.
> Whatever happens, we are on the side of people. We are trying to solve these problems. We take no satisfaction in contributing to them, and we are not working to make them more likely.
The cognitive dissonance/doublespeak/hypocrisy (pick one) is absolutely insane.
They are concurrently:
1. creating and marketing products that are explicitly trying to automate, if not entire professions, at least big parts of them
2. edicting grand policy plans to limit the impact of massive job displacement that their products might cause
3. directly funding and coordinating missionary-type activities ("it's for a greater cause") to evangelize and propagate said products in areas of the economy that are usually underfunded and where job security is already quite bad (non-profits, NGOs)
For example?
Most of the products they build seem to be tools rather than replacements.
Is it annoying? Yeah. Is it preachy and hypocritical? Yeah. And I've yet to hear anyone suggest something better.
Yet at the same time, they are a public benefit corporation, and I'm not quite sure what that means? Is that a separate legal entity from the for-profit arm?
If it works, using AI to cut jobs in the non-profit sector would be a good thing. Those jobs are overhead (necessary overhead, but overhead nonetheless) that reduces how much donor money actually makes it to the people it’s supposed to help. If AI can eliminate those jobs, that means a larger share of money that’s donated will actually get used for providing services.
All non-profits need to do is demand model-agnostic deliverables, insist on handoff documentation, and budget for switching costs before the year ends.