Missed opportunity to call this a "Phil-Anthropic" partnership. The word doesn't appear once in TFA. Highly disappointed.
Seeing some of the comments here speculating about ulterior motives, I'd like to say there are probably none other than the usual (goodwill, publicity, taxes, etc.) A little known aspect of the Gates Foundation finances, their problem really isn't getting more money. Their biggest problem is spending their money faster than it grows.
Is anyone keeping track of all these “partnerships” and “investments” in one place? This is all turning into a ton of what looks like PR fodder that appears to go nowhere.
This doesn't seem to be investment focussed activity, but rather extending Claude credits for education and research. Which is a good thing, independent of other bad things that might be happening.
Anthropic profits from the PR, for one. And they likely hook these institutions on their products in the long term, for two – much like I was "stuck" on Azure until recently, thanks to their free startup credits pointing me to it a decade ago.
There are ways one can engage in financial engineering (is "accounting engineering" a term yet?) where despite not making a profit, you segregate a tax break, tax credit, charitable deduction, etc. into some other entity and then can sell that off as an asset that some other business that is making a profit buys and writes off against its own profits.
Ed Zitron[1] has a lot of articles and podcast episodes on these deals. The nice thing about it is that he occasionally revisits the old announcements to check what happened with them. Apparently a lot of these deals just evaporate after prolonged contact with reality.
I think a tell that many of these deals likely aren't real and are basically just PR is the numbers are super round and digestable.
That's a clear signal that little analysis has gone into the numbers and, most generously, there's nothing but the shape of a deal the details of which will be ironed out and adjusted in practice.
I get that the amounts of funding and capital being sat on for the respective parties are collossal and lead to rounding that doesn't make sense from the point of view of an individual any more (what's a few million at this scale, just round up to nearest 10, etc) but deal sizes of literally round numbers of 100s start to stretch credibility on whether any real analysis was involved.
In fact it'd be a ridiculous coincidence if it had been. They're the kind of figures where you'd recheck your calculations to check it's right as it seems too perfectly round.
This stuff helps prevent the bubble popping, which means when they want the bubble to pop, they stop announcing these deals, giving them a great lever of profit.
Crazy how they can just lie to this extent without consequences. Or still get paid millions for making bad deals, meaning incompetence
Compared to the insanely circular deals that OpenAI made? I have slight more confidence in Anthropics partnerships honestly. This is the Gates foundation dropping 200 million for use of Claude for medical research, unlike OpenaAIs weird "we will buy stuff off you in the future" but I don't know that they actually ever have or did.
A lot of the recent news just makes me think much worse of Anthropic.
If you're going to partner with a charitable Gates, choose the good one (though to be fair, she's probably going to be far more discerning).
And Anthropic's decision to become complicit in poisoning Memphis with Grok's methane turbines already put the lie to the idea they are the conscientious ones when it comes to large AI companies.
He spent most of that effort undermining proven solutions and propping up his own investments which have a poor record so this is not out of character.
How are people out here defending these people like you have to have a totally depraved worldview to even think that these people should live in the same world as us
Do you have a better suggestion for eliminating the Epstein class?
> Some of us actually live by our values for example not raping trafficked prostitutes and then giving infections to our wives and then lying to them about it
And advocating for the streamed, live dissection of the accused, apparently.
> This is one of the most insane things I’ve read recently so kudos to being totally depraved
The helped easing up on the resources of Earth with his investment in certain pharma companies and now owns a giant amount of the farmland of the US too.
Any given year congress could pass something letting farmland owned before X date be passed to your children without taxes. I've seen lots of congressmen telling sob stories about a constituent losing the 8-figure family farm due to taxes. Gates owns the farmland personally, not in the foundation. But it could just be diversifying assets. Lots of tech billionaires buy up lots of land.
The "Melinda" bit already dropped? Why did she leave him? Great guy to do a partnership with the same-named foundations of.
I'll take the downvotes (just saw that _all_ posts that comment negatively on the foundation are well downvoted: I gave each of 'm an upvote just to counter all the AI bots on here, cause sure there are).
Not the OP, but I suspect it's because of Bill Gates' recent scandals involving Jeffrey Epstein. Specifically with Bill Gates spiking his wife's food with antibiotics to cover up the fact that he got an STD from a Russian prostitute.
I mean, sure, in the set of things that one could put into my food surreptitiously, antibiotics is one of the better ones (I guess assuming that the spiker does the full regimen). I'll acknowledge that amoxicillin is better than a roofie.
It's still unbelievably scummy to infect your partner with a disease and then drug that partner because you're too much of a coward to come forward about it. Adultery is already bad, infecting your partner because of that adultery is bad, drugging them to cover it up is bad.
To explain: first, they did not pay proper taxes, in particular the older Evil here. But even more importantly, in the USA a foundation can own patents, among other things. They need to give out a certain % on a yearly basis, but basically it is a corporation.
As a leftist, I’ve never once considered Bill Gates or Anthropic to be even remotely left-wing. I’m not sure how it would be possible to frame them like that.
The Gates Foundation has done measurably terrible work harming public education in the US.
They do good work on infection disease, vaccines, and childhood mortality in the world but this partnership speaks to the worst of what the foundation does. I hope someone there has some perspective for where they have wasted charitable funds and can use that insight here.
The line in the press release that matters isn't the $200M headline — it's
that the Foundation will use Claude across "global health, education, and
agricultural development" delivery work, not just research. That's
operational deployment, which means evaluation harnesses, deployment SLAs,
and prompt-caching strategy at scale across very heterogeneous use cases.
For reference: most enterprise commitments I've seen quoted near this range
are training + dedicated capacity + a research collab. This one reads more
like a multi-year managed-services contract attached to a delivery
organization. Whether it produces anything depends entirely on the
Foundation's eval-pipeline maturity — and historically large grant-making
orgs aren't fast at standing those up.
The prompt-cache-window joke up-thread actually hits the right structural
question: is $200M effectively the volume discount for committing 5-year
batched workloads, or is it new R&D dollars? The press release wording is
careful enough that I read it as the former.
They were a little late, but did have the dominant browser for most of the 2000's. To say they "missed the boat" is a bit much. There was a dark period from 1999 to 2004 or so where IE was basically the only usable browser.
How far are we from the next pandemic followed by the first "AI Vaccine" developed by Claude Mythos in collaboration with the Gates Foundation and Pfizer?
Seeing some of the comments here speculating about ulterior motives, I'd like to say there are probably none other than the usual (goodwill, publicity, taxes, etc.) A little known aspect of the Gates Foundation finances, their problem really isn't getting more money. Their biggest problem is spending their money faster than it grows.
[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/
That's a clear signal that little analysis has gone into the numbers and, most generously, there's nothing but the shape of a deal the details of which will be ironed out and adjusted in practice.
I get that the amounts of funding and capital being sat on for the respective parties are collossal and lead to rounding that doesn't make sense from the point of view of an individual any more (what's a few million at this scale, just round up to nearest 10, etc) but deal sizes of literally round numbers of 100s start to stretch credibility on whether any real analysis was involved.
In fact it'd be a ridiculous coincidence if it had been. They're the kind of figures where you'd recheck your calculations to check it's right as it seems too perfectly round.
Crazy how they can just lie to this extent without consequences. Or still get paid millions for making bad deals, meaning incompetence
If you're going to partner with a charitable Gates, choose the good one (though to be fair, she's probably going to be far more discerning).
And Anthropic's decision to become complicit in poisoning Memphis with Grok's methane turbines already put the lie to the idea they are the conscientious ones when it comes to large AI companies.
Gates Foundation and/or principal actors attached to the Gates Foundation have equity stakes in Anthropic ...
... and they have made a decision to direct charitable funds toward the committed purchase of Anthropic tokens.
Do I have that right ?
Very much like Huang charitable foundation committing to purchase Coreweave services[1] ... which Huang has equity stakes in ?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/nvidia-ceos-foun...
despite him controlling the Foundation.
He actively abused trafficked women including non-consensually exposing his wife to an STI
These are the worst people on the planet and should be dissected while living and live-streamed as an example to others
You sound like an exemplar citizen yourself /s
Do you have a better suggestion for eliminating the Epstein class?
and just stop ignoring it,
as a society?
And advocating for the streamed, live dissection of the accused, apparently.
> This is one of the most insane things I’ve read recently so kudos to being totally depraved
What for though? I always hear this, but what's the point of it?
I'll take the downvotes (just saw that _all_ posts that comment negatively on the foundation are well downvoted: I gave each of 'm an upvote just to counter all the AI bots on here, cause sure there are).
out here in the normal world, doing any of this surreptitious stuff is wrong,
and if you’re following, it’s only the tip of their iceberg.
It's still unbelievably scummy to infect your partner with a disease and then drug that partner because you're too much of a coward to come forward about it. Adultery is already bad, infecting your partner because of that adultery is bad, drugging them to cover it up is bad.
To explain: first, they did not pay proper taxes, in particular the older Evil here. But even more importantly, in the USA a foundation can own patents, among other things. They need to give out a certain % on a yearly basis, but basically it is a corporation.
Edit: to those downvoting, even Melinda Gates left the Gates Foundation over Epstein. Not sure why my statement is even remotely controversial.
They do good work on infection disease, vaccines, and childhood mortality in the world but this partnership speaks to the worst of what the foundation does. I hope someone there has some perspective for where they have wasted charitable funds and can use that insight here.
For reference: most enterprise commitments I've seen quoted near this range are training + dedicated capacity + a research collab. This one reads more like a multi-year managed-services contract attached to a delivery organization. Whether it produces anything depends entirely on the Foundation's eval-pipeline maturity — and historically large grant-making orgs aren't fast at standing those up.
The prompt-cache-window joke up-thread actually hits the right structural question: is $200M effectively the volume discount for committing 5-year batched workloads, or is it new R&D dollars? The press release wording is careful enough that I read it as the former.
By offering it for "free" as part of the OS. Which they could only do because they never intended to pay the developers who wrote it.
In a classic Microsoft move they fucked over their competition, their partners and the entire ecosystem for well over a decade.