Welcome Anthropic as a Corporate Patron sponsor of the Blender Foundation鈥檚 Development Fund! 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/
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@Blender even if this does not give anthropic any control over blender, the messaging is tone deaf, especially on the fediverse. If you're going to accept money from a company as toxic as Anthropic, the announcement needs to at the very least critique them, not blandly heap praise for the donation. Community trust is hard to win and easy to lose, so I would think hard about the message this post is sending to your community.
@Blender no, it's not welcome :/
Nein.
Non.
No.
Nah.
Niet.
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.
@Blender I have read both and I still don't understand why Blender is accepting financial dependence on a corporation that is actively destroying the open web with scraping, fueling the ongoing slop contribution denial of service attack against foss maintainers, is a major player in the industry that is actively harming digital artists, and numerous other harms; nor do I understand how you expect us not to be angry and heartbroken by this news. Perhaps you could explain it to us.
@Blender Anthropic is a defense contractor and works with the US Government and Palantir to do some absolutely horrific shit. Claude Code was recently used to bomb a little girl's school.
That's just the tip of the ice berg. Anthropic is a really horrible company with no ethics:
@Blender you guys... I have been financially supporting you for like 15 years, and I help run the SLC Blender User Group to promote free and open tools for everyone. Reading this breaks my heart. As an artist who's art has been stolen by this plagiarism machine, and as a coder who's code has been stolen by this plagiarism machine, this feels like a pretty hard slap in the face. Your community doesn't want you taking dirty money like this from unethical tech bros. Please reconsider.
@Blender to expand a little on the wave of disappointed replies you're seeing, genAI has been a scourge within a huge range of artist communities for the past few years. on balance it has made the lives of a large % of visual artists worse, has been used as justification to pay them less or not at all - despite being trained on their work without their permission.
the boosters are loud and very well-funded. please instead listen to your community.
@mastodonmigration @Blender Blender is completely inaccessible BTW. Too busy taking the war money.
@Blender I am sorry for your loss
@Blender you should have turned that one down