In these uncertain and divisive times, we appreciate Anthropic offering support to the Blender project in the form of a Patron-level membership. This enables the Blender team to keep pursuing projects independently, and to focus on building tools for artists and creators.
Francesco Siddi, CEO at Blender
It isn’t about there being any contact at all, it is about the inherent corrupting nature of money. If they become a corporate patron they are paying money to the Blender Foundation who can then use that funding to hire people to work on Blender. This all seems cool and normal.
The problem is not with getting the funding. The problem is once you have the funding you don’t want to lose it. That means you will be more likely to tweak things a little, embrace things that suit your corporate patrons, and not block features your community doesn’t want. For example, AI.
So if I make a prediction about this it isn’t that tomorrow Blender will have AI tools integrated throughout the whole stack. It is that over time, especially a year or more from now, AI related tools will come to Blender and they will be Anthropic based tools.
Will they be required? No, of course not. But they will be there and they will be opt out. And along with that the development of other tools which would have filled the niche the Anthropic tools have taken over will not be developed. So less work will go into something that an Anthropic tool could do instead.
It isn’t malice, it isn’t direct evil, but it will give Anthropic a quick leg up to getting all the graphic artists and modelers to use their tools rather than a competitors, and they can do it all while looking good.
The same thing happened with computers for schools. If kids grow up using Apple computers they buy them as adults and take those skills into their careers. If they instead learn on Windows machines then they take those skills forward. The whole industry is shaped by these choices and that locks in massive profits for those companies. Why do you think Google worked so hard on Chromebooks?
I would prefer for none of my apps to use the plagiarism machines in any way. I would prefer that any AI “enhancement” was a plugin I could easily install but not installed by default. But I am not going to get that, so it is disappointing.
I think the main counter argument to this is a practical one. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, all these greedy corporations have contributed to many open source projects and initiatives. Google has a strong influence in defining web standards, should we ditch web browsing? Amazon and even Microsoft have contributed to Linux either trough donations or direct contributions, both in the kernel and in foundational software that runs on top of it. Should we ditch using Linux servers?
What shows is that while money can corrupt it is not an inevitability. So instead of ditching Blender because Anthropic donates to it I’d suggest ditching Blender only if and when they start rolling out vendor-locked Antrophoc AI integrations rather than take a dogmatic ai company = bad stance.
I agree, I didn’t say with clarity that the reason for the worry is the above. I worry things will work out that way and AI companies are the absolute worst offenders for screwing everyone over constantly so it seems more likely with them than another company.
That said, Blender wouldn’t be where it is without contributions from various companies that drove features forward and made contributions to it. I do worry about the future, but I feel that way about most tech, the average person does not benefit from DRM at all but Linux supports it to some degree. I can remove support if I want and there are distros that support that, but in a world with corporate control as law I guess this is the best we can hope for for now.