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.
> Their biggest problem is spending their money faster than it grows.
Yep this is an interesting thing that most of us don't tend to think about when it comes to philanthropy (or even gov spending) ... it's really really hard to _spend_ money effectively.
Because there's all the work around accountability, checking for fraudulent applications, checking if your money made an impact, deciding where to even focus, all those things.
Not only that, but to legally be a charity, you have to spend at least 5% of your assets every year. So not only do they have to stay ahead of their own growth, they have to spend down 5% of quite a lot!
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.
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.
That guy needs to chill down. You listen to it and then after the umpteenth episode you just turn it off. He enjoys his own voice very MUCH. And he repeats the same thing again and again and again, and it is very tiring.
Ed Zitron is a terrible source, he is so staunchly anti AI that he is effectively blind. Once in a while he'll be right by pure chance, but I wouldn't rely on any of it.
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
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.
Like Stargate? We’re investing $0.5T! Well, over 4 years, but $100B now for sure. Well, maybe just $50B and we will borrow the rest, probably. Well… not today. it’s more of a “commitment” than an investment. OK, OK, we haven’t actually raised any money for this.
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.
Have you worked in a big company before? I swear they were announcing random partnerships and MoUs every week. They never went anywhere except fancy dinners for the executives involved. Sometimes they were literally announcing partnerships with essentially competitors, because apparently executives on both sides were too stupid to understand their own business.
The worst were the ones where long after all the cocktails were drunk, some executive (too stupid to understand the vapid nature of these partnerships) got it into his mind to "check up on the progress of the cooperation". That mess predictably rolled downhill because nobody was willing to tell them the truth.
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.
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.
I was thinking Buffett said that and Gates was still leaving some. I don't know why the farmland then. Maybe to get easy access to veterinarian antibiotics.
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.
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? (/s)
Why should an outlaw with virtually unlimited resources be given oversight of money for any purpose whatsoever? Just because he has enough money to avoid consequences and the ability to constantly try to launder tarnished reputation doesn't negate the fact that this is completely optional and unnecessary. Out of however many billions of people on Earth, we can't select people with a clear record to administer public benefit operations? Absurd.
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.
What "great" thing has Bill Gates ever done? He's engaged in predatory business practices, released utterly shite products and is most famous for being an Epstein guy. Obviously a lot of people care judging by the amount of (now flagged) comments about it in this thread.
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.
Even if you forgive him drugging his wife, which you shouldn't, he's not exactly a good person.
Read through the antitrust stuff that happened in the 90's. He's not a good guy. I know he puts on this persona of "geeky nice guy", and I'll admit that I fell for it too long, but he's a multi billionaire, and like other multi billionaires he is not a good person.
If he is the "least evil person you can think of", then you're not thinking very hard.
I'm not going to blame a fellow pedant for being pedantic :)
You could probably amend this to "billionaires", instead of the qualifying "multi billionaires".
ETA: You know, I was thinking, just because I qualified it with "multi" in front doesn't really imply that single-billionaires aren't evil. I didn't specify that serial killers are evil either, but I don't think me not specifying that implies that I think they're fine.
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).
This seems to be quite a recent development. duckduckgo has Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the title. Google and the title tag on the website do not.
As for the value of Bill Gates as a husband or of his foundation, the positives don't outweigh the negatives. I have no problem saying with certainty that this is a bad move on Anthropic's part, because anything that Gates Foundation does could be done under an untarnished name.
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.
The MA hate is real and well deserved but there actually was a period of time where IE was the browser of choice for all the right reasons. People forget that part, but Microsoft has really made good products when they want to.
Plus IE got the box model right in the first place. It really was a good browser and had an interesting design with COM / MSHTML for embedding. The problem really was that it stagnated and had no real competition until Chrome (even though Firefox was slowly gaining traction)
Plus during this time there was little competition on the desktop market in general. iPhone and smart phones, and the Apple resurgence, was yet to come.
Yep, the IE 6 era felt like it lasted forever. It was a solid browser, relatively stable and fast (compared to Netscape, at least.) IE was also the main browser on Mac OS X for the first couple of releases!
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.
> Their biggest problem is spending their money faster than it grows.
Yep this is an interesting thing that most of us don't tend to think about when it comes to philanthropy (or even gov spending) ... it's really really hard to _spend_ money effectively.
Because there's all the work around accountability, checking for fraudulent applications, checking if your money made an impact, deciding where to even focus, all those things.
Bill-Anthropic ;)
Not only that, but to legally be a charity, you have to spend at least 5% of your assets every year. So not only do they have to stay ahead of their own growth, they have to spend down 5% of quite a lot!
It would need to be Bill-anthropic which somehow sounds much like it
Who's phil?
Agreed, I imagine it's been a lot harder for bill to offload all that excess money ever since jeff epstein died.
Most convincing evidence to date that he is in fact dead
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.
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.
[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/
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.
That guy needs to chill down. You listen to it and then after the umpteenth episode you just turn it off. He enjoys his own voice very MUCH. And he repeats the same thing again and again and again, and it is very tiring.
Ed Zitron is a terrible source, he is so staunchly anti AI that he is effectively blind. Once in a while he'll be right by pure chance, but I wouldn't rely on any of it.
Eh, this is an ad-hominem. Ed being anti-AI does not adress the validity of his arguments.
I think he misses the mark when he insists on AI being useless. It is useful, although far from what the people hyping AI claim.
But when he delves in the numbers, his arguments are very solid (and I am still to see someone counter him on that).
Agreed. Curious to know if any other prominent voices have delved into the numbers in a similar way?
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
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.
And a sizable tax deduction.
IANAA, but pretty sure you can only deduct a donation against business profit. Are you suggesting that Anthropic is running at a profit?
Net Operating Losses (NOLs) in one year can offset taxes owed in future years. It works for personal taxes too if it's a "casualty" loss.
you can often carry over the losses for multiple years sometimes.
Who profits from that deduction and how?
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.
One assumes Anthropic given it's them doing the donating, but you also have to be actually making a profit to be paying tax.
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.
I make sure I frequently talk about running a marathon someday, just so all my friends think I'm in better shape than I am.
Like Stargate? We’re investing $0.5T! Well, over 4 years, but $100B now for sure. Well, maybe just $50B and we will borrow the rest, probably. Well… not today. it’s more of a “commitment” than an investment. OK, OK, we haven’t actually raised any money for this.
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.
Have you worked in a big company before? I swear they were announcing random partnerships and MoUs every week. They never went anywhere except fancy dinners for the executives involved. Sometimes they were literally announcing partnerships with essentially competitors, because apparently executives on both sides were too stupid to understand their own business.
The worst were the ones where long after all the cocktails were drunk, some executive (too stupid to understand the vapid nature of these partnerships) got it into his mind to "check up on the progress of the cooperation". That mess predictably rolled downhill because nobody was willing to tell them the truth.
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.
Bill Gates, famous climate activist? Mmm.
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.
Let's also not forget his wife divorcing him over his Epstein partying.
And not the long and rampart infidelity
Why would it be one or the other,
not emphatically both?
Odd to say.
I specifically came here hoping to find authoritative discussion on whether or not this could be a net-good in any way,
despite him controlling the Foundation.
Reply.
The problem with AI is that no one has gotten around to asking it how to solve climate change. Once we do, it'll all be ok
Don’t forget: friend of notorious pedophile jeffery epstein.
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.
> now owns a giant amount of the farmland of the US too.
What for though? I always hear this, but what's the point of it?
Hoarding resources
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.
He’s donated something like $100 billion already… there’s no chance he’s buying farmland as an inheritance tax dodge.
He has also said it many, many times, he's not leaving his kids anything.
I was thinking Buffett said that and Gates was still leaving some. I don't know why the farmland then. Maybe to get easy access to veterinarian antibiotics.
Is that $200M with the prompt cache at five minutes, or one hour?
So... Does the Gates foundation get an equity stake?
An equity stake? Psh time for the Gates Foundation to become a normal for-profit AI company!
“It’s for National Security.”
Let me guess ...
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...
Claude is officially dead to me now.
Welp, time to make sure your triple F reserves are stocked up.
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.
You say measurably - tell us more about the measurement?
I was hoping for De-Epsteinification of tech. Disappointment move.
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.
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? (/s)
I'm a fan of Anthropic's product but this is incredibly tone deaf and makes me reconsider the judgement of their leadership.
Why?
Why should an outlaw with virtually unlimited resources be given oversight of money for any purpose whatsoever? Just because he has enough money to avoid consequences and the ability to constantly try to launder tarnished reputation doesn't negate the fact that this is completely optional and unnecessary. Out of however many billions of people on Earth, we can't select people with a clear record to administer public benefit operations? Absurd.
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’d much rather have someone spike my food with antibiotics than anything else.
What purpose does a statement like this serve?
Like most, I’d much rather my food not be spiked at all.
The purpose is overlooking a great man’s great achievements with some piddling nonsense no one cares about.
What "great" thing has Bill Gates ever done? He's engaged in predatory business practices, released utterly shite products and is most famous for being an Epstein guy. Obviously a lot of people care judging by the amount of (now flagged) comments about it in this thread.
I think secretly drugging your wife is something a lot of people care about, actually.
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.
Those can kill you btw.
Good for you,
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.
Evil & Evil unite.
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.
Gates is probably the least evil person I can think of. The truly decrepit evil lies in the halls of our government now.
You must know a lot of shitty people or just aggressively bought into his not-so-recent PR switch. Maybe both.
Even if you forgive him drugging his wife, which you shouldn't, he's not exactly a good person.
Read through the antitrust stuff that happened in the 90's. He's not a good guy. I know he puts on this persona of "geeky nice guy", and I'll admit that I fell for it too long, but he's a multi billionaire, and like other multi billionaires he is not a good person.
If he is the "least evil person you can think of", then you're not thinking very hard.
Oddly specific to call out multi billionaires. So a single billion is fine? The threshold is at 2?
I'm not going to blame a fellow pedant for being pedantic :)
You could probably amend this to "billionaires", instead of the qualifying "multi billionaires".
ETA: You know, I was thinking, just because I qualified it with "multi" in front doesn't really imply that single-billionaires aren't evil. I didn't specify that serial killers are evil either, but I don't think me not specifying that implies that I think they're fine.
The gates foundation: money laundering and influence purchasing for billionaires who occasionally want to slip their wives antibiotics.
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).
This seems to be quite a recent development. duckduckgo has Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the title. Google and the title tag on the website do not.
As for the value of Bill Gates as a husband or of his foundation, the positives don't outweigh the negatives. I have no problem saying with certainty that this is a bad move on Anthropic's part, because anything that Gates Foundation does could be done under an untarnished name.
Gates missed the boat with the internet. This is not going to happen a second time!
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.
… i’m still seeing a therapist about this time period.
> but did have the dominant browser for most of the 2000's.
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.
The MA hate is real and well deserved but there actually was a period of time where IE was the browser of choice for all the right reasons. People forget that part, but Microsoft has really made good products when they want to.
Plus IE got the box model right in the first place. It really was a good browser and had an interesting design with COM / MSHTML for embedding. The problem really was that it stagnated and had no real competition until Chrome (even though Firefox was slowly gaining traction)
Plus during this time there was little competition on the desktop market in general. iPhone and smart phones, and the Apple resurgence, was yet to come.
Yep, the IE 6 era felt like it lasted forever. It was a solid browser, relatively stable and fast (compared to Netscape, at least.) IE was also the main browser on Mac OS X for the first couple of releases!
The problem was that they had no interest in having their browser abide by the standards that existed.
It was a rough time. IE was the only browser that worked well.
Netscape 4.x crashed every 20 minutes. Mozilla (before Firefox) was barely usable. Chrome was no where to be seen yet.