Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor.
-
Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
@Blender you’ve mishandled this.
Yes, the donation will benefit the foundation and should not result in giving anthropic any influence over the project
But,
(1) the real world does not work that way, and we all know that. Anthropic now has a relationship with blender. And that is poison to your mission.
(2) you should be ensuring that anthropic will never have influence and assuring us that you will personally see to it.
(3) you did not acknowledge that AI companies like Anthropic have been stealing the work of artists - your user base - to train their models. There’s a hell of a lot to address there if you are going to accept money from them.You should have rejected their donation very publicly because anthropic is a threat to your user base. Every ai company raises money on promising to destroy our jobs. While they are too incompetent to succeed YOU should take that seriously and take a stand.
-
@Blender congrats on securing funding, I get this is important for opensource projects.
personally I don't get the outrage, Meta, Wacom, Nvidia, Microsoft, AMD, Adobe, Apple, and Netflix weren't scary enough but Anthropic does it?
how do people think opensource projects get funded -
Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
-
Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
@Blender Honestly, I'm not sure which shocks me more: the sponsorship itself, or the fact that you're announcing it happily and proudly without considering how problematic it might be for your community.
Unfortunately, I'll take this as a sign of a pro-AI cultural shift at the Blender Foundation. What a disappointment. -
@amosmulder the idea is that we welcome funding towards the project, under Blender's condition. This usually has the support of the community. This case of funding is clearly extremely polarizing.
@fsiddi I appreciate you taking the time to engage with the community here
Please keep in mind that those giving feedback are the "seen" bit of the community, while the *whole* community iceberg will shift subtly over time from a decision like this, even if the number of users stays about the same
People who are ok with AI extracting value from FOSS (or OotL) may continue to use Blender more, for example, while I feel like no longer recommending Blender to students
️🩹 -
Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
-
Make sure to check out the full message on https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/ and the funding policy at https://fund.blender.org/funding-policy/ to get the complete picture.
-
@subterfugue @Blender The absurdity of comments don’t translate cleanly to sarcasm on the internet and DEFINITELY not on Mastodon (as you can see from other people who have responded to me with personal attacks).
It's whatevs.
When companies donate to FOSS it’s typically because they’re using the tech internally so I was more speaking to the wild possibility of Claude being able to generate basic models for prototyping.
@netopwibby yup. It’s good that you’ve learned that.
-
Note: partially reworded the social media announcement so it sounds less tone-deaf about the controversial nature of the membership.
-
@Blender "The Blender developers have created an MCP connector"
Ah, I think I've found the problem.
Cite: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-creative-work
-
@Blender "to maintain and continuously improve (...) Blender Python API" does mean this preparing Blender to be used by AI agents? 🫠
Not exactly thrilled by this announcement..
-
Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
-
Note: partially reworded the social media announcement so it sounds less tone-deaf about the controversial nature of the membership.
@Blender Dear social media worker. I hope you read this. Hi, we know you're job sucks. It's what you chose to make a living with. I hope you're job isn't on the line due to some "negative" press for this @Blender company. You've found the real world in social media form. We are not what you're boss or his bosses want to know exist. Because this is a large influx of cash coming from a well known threat actor, most are happy to stop using this program. Good day Sir/Madam/LGBTQ+
-
@Blender Point to your policies all you want.
The correct choice here is to not accept the money, and to tell Anthropic & their ilk to go away. Take a meaningful stance against the companies that are actively hurting and stealing from the artists that depend on tools like blender.
Welcoming them, accepting their money, is a clear signal that you care more about the money than the people they harm - including many of your own users - to get it. -
@fsiddi @greg holy crap, I think they used this exact line of dialog in the Godzilla/Kong TV show. I'm pretty sure it went, "Apex must believe that Monarch is a company worth investing in." You're using a trope. It was obvious in that show who the bad guy is.
I'm sorry, you're a big time CEO and I'm just an artist who would like to use your software.
I would like to use that without Anthropic's money involved. I would like that without any possibility of my work, or my information like where I live and what I'm working on, being fed to this machine in which to rage against.
You're right that taking this money and having this relationship with Anthropic crossed a line.
The only solution is to admit the mistake, give back the money, sever ties, and then make a stance against the use of AI in your code as well as a commitment to data privacy.
Otherwise, everyone like me will be looking for a sensible fork or alternative.
Thanks for listening.
-
Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
-
All right, Francesco here - CEO at Blender. I'm going to spend some time to try and respond. If you have direct questions or comments, reply here!
-
@Blender maybe you shouldn't partner with actual pirates. Read the room. Do you really think that they won't just steal our 3D art now? Because that's the message and very likely the reality. As a company you deserve the bad press over this, no matter how much you justify this.
(Sorry to the maintainer of this account, you probably aren't in a position to change things and it sucks that your whole day will be some variation of this reaction)
-
All right, Francesco here - CEO at Blender. I'm going to spend some time to try and respond. If you have direct questions or comments, reply here!
