AI developer Anthropic becomes Blender’s latest Corporate Patron

AI developer Anthropic has become the latest Corporate Patron of the Blender Development Fund, contributing €240,000/year towards development of the open-source 3D software.

The Blender Lab has also developed a new MCP server connecting Anthropic’s Claude AI models to Blender, for debugging scenes, or to batch-apply changes to objects within a scene.

The announcement has proven controversial with Blender users, so below, we’ve tried to unpick some of the key issues it raises.

How much is Anthropic donating to Blender development?
Anthropic becomes Blender’s latest full corporate patron, alongside other recent donors like Bolt Graphics, Wacom and Netflix Animation Studios.

Its €240,000/year roughly equates to the annual salaries of four full-time Blender developers.

Anthropic’s funding will be “dedicated towards Blender core development”, particularly the Python API.

How have Blender users reacted to the donation?
The announcement has proven divisive within the Blender community, with responses on social media running the gamut from “this is a smart move” to “I will never donate to you again”.

Blender users are, as a whole, more sceptical of big corporations than those of other CG tools, so the ongoing donations from Google and Meta have also proven controversial in the past.

However, given some artists’ visceral dislike of generative AI, responses to Anthropic’s donation have been particularly polarized.

Blender CEO Francesco Siddi alludes to this obliquely in the Blender Foundation’s press release announcing Anthropic’s corporate patronage, commenting:

“In these uncertain and divisive times, we appreciate Anthropic offering support to the Blender project […] This enables the Blender team to keep pursuing projects independently, and to focus on building tools for artists and creators.”

Unusually, the press release also links to Blender’s funding policy, which includes the statement:

“Corporate participation in the Development Fund does not imply alignment between Blender and the donor’s mission, products, or strategy”.

Can Anthropic now influence Blender development?
For context, Blender is open-source, so no donor can own or control the code base.

When it comes to influencing future development, the Blender Foundation does “reach out to Corporate members to discuss the annual planning for grants and review past supported projects”.

Patron status also gives a company “board contact” with the Foundation.

According to the most recent Blender annual report, corporate patrons were Blender’s largest individual funding source.

However, if we’ve done the math correctly, each individual Corporate Patron currently represents around 7% of total funding: significant, but far short of providing a controlling vote.

Why is Anthropic donating to Blender development?
Corporate patrons clearly do use their donations as platforms from which to promote products, and in Anthropic’s case, that’s the new connectors between Claude and creative tools.

The add-ons connect Claude, Anthropic’s family of large language models, to CG applications.

As well as Blender, that includes Adobe software like Photoshop, Affinity, Autodesk’s CAD software Fusion, and SketchUp.

Suggested uses range from simply using Claude to summarize technical documentation, to automating repetitive tasks – as with the Affinity connection – to writing custom tools.

What is the new Blender connection with Claude?
In the case of Blender, the new connector has been developed by the Blender Lab, the Blender Foundation’s new program for developing experimental features for the software.

It’s an extension to Claude Desktop that makes it possible to “analyze and debug entire Blender scenes, or build custom scripts to batch-apply changes to objects in a scene”.

The connector is built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard for connecting AI models to external data, so it can be used by other LLMs, not just Anthropic’s.

The add-on is available now for Blender 5.1: you can find instructions for installing it here.

How do AI tools fit with Blender’s overall ethos?
According to Blender’s press release, “we maintain APIs for individuals and corporations to extend Blender, also beyond what’s aligned with Blender’s mission”.

“We consider this part of the Software Freedom that’s embodied with Blender’s GNU GPL license.”

Not everyone agrees: Bart Veldhuizen, founder of veteran Blender community news site BlenderNation, has an interesting contrasting perspective, which you can read here.

Read the Blender Foundation’s announcement of Anthropic’s Corporate Patron status

Read Anthropic’s announcement of the connectors between Claude and CG tools like Blender

Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.