UPDATE: Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund
Francesco posted an update to the way the Blender Foundation handles Anthropic’s support.
Earlier this week, Anthropic became a Blender Development Fund sponsor, and announced MCP support for Blender – allowing Claude to interact directly with Blender scenes. This started a hot debate in the community. On the one side, people were excited about the new tools and options. But on the other side, there was real concern about teaming up with the AI industry which is treatening many people’s jobs. Some of that debate wasn’t pretty.
The Blender Foundation has now done two things. First, it converted Anthropic’s Development Fund membership into a regular donation. This might seem like a semantic change, but it’s not: a membership implies a relationship and a donation is a one-off one-way transaction. The Foundation retains full discretion over how they spend it.
Second, and in my opinion more important: the team will start developing a general framework for how to handle genAI technology in all aspects of the product and operation. This will be done in the open, so the community can chime in too.
Francesco writes:
Blender is a tool for artists and creators, it’s made by humans for humans. No generative AI functionality is currently available or planned to be integrated in Blender.
I want to thank everyone for their understanding and helpful feedback, as we deal with this topic, and keep improving the Blender project together.
You can read the full announcement on Blender.org, and Francesco also posted a thread on Mastodon with some further insights, the most important one being (in my opinion) this:
Besides a few very kind, concerned and constructive takes, it’s been concerning to see so many antisocial reactions to the original announcement. It looks like social media is tearing us apart. I hope more people consider getting involved and supporting the Blender project in the future, feeling confident that their contribution will matter.
People are worried about their futures – there’s real fear in society right now for this new technology. But don’t forget that the team at the Blender Foundation are our friends. They’ve been with us for years and they share our values. Even when we disagree we owe them our respect and have a civilized conversation with them.
This reads like corporate-PR more than anything. But I suppose it’s some progress.
I would have rather seen it turned down all together.
But even more damning is the fact that blender already has ai slop commits in it’s code.
https://github.com/blender/blender/commit/336b5d0de12a438614846961b7961bbf35399eb3
https://github.com/blender/blender/commit/79e02e1405a98884cc8fd5505cc54df2c2dc5d21
https://github.com/blender/blender/commit/7ee94c067cf71845727672ed77dc25f088cd5b32
https://github.com/blender/blender/commit/b80b3e040dd3ac979e97540b4bb0f18a1c5ad021
https://github.com/blender/blender/commit/eaadb0c3043288d78b897b15bcc8d336c749de15
No, I’m afraid blender went dark. :(
That’s a different topic, but I agree that’s not good.
Oh they felt “annoyed” by “antisocial” reactions. How they were expecting people to react with them getting into bed with a corporation that is responsible for mass layoffs or, even worse, getting killed in some warzone that same corporation happens to offer their services?
Yeah, no. Instead of canceling the deal and apologizing they wag a finger.
FWIW, I do agree that contributions by Meta and other tech-feudalist companies are no good either, and should have been turned down.
I’m also not so sure all the corporate money has been good for blender:
On the one hand it’s nice to have a game engine, video editing, and the entire kitchen sink,… on the other hand, it’s obviously out of control bloat at this point.
Each of those ought to probably be a separate distinct application and project, they could still integrate seamlessly with one another. I’d prefer if the focus for blender were on modelling.
This is probably a /very/ unpopular opinion, but: I have been a blender user from the very beginning, and I must admit I kind of prefer the old UI, and while I welcome some much needed new modelling features, I can’t help but feel like overall the project seems to have gone downhill ever since 3.x onward. 2.49b was peak blender for me. But clearly I’m no longer the target audience.
Are you serious?
+1, the old UI was definitely better, and it’s not a matter of habit, I’d only been using Blender for a couple of years before they changed it. There’s a reason Blender still natively supports 2.7x key mappings, right-click select and everything. If you and I were the only people who prefer that setup, they’d have phased it out long ago.
It’s funny because I thought Blender was about advancing technology and 3D art development, not a bunch of Amish technophobe luddites!
Weird conclusion to jump to.
Being skeptical of or against large language models (not even AI necessarily) does not mean one is born in 1800’s. It also does not mean one is techno-phobic.
I for one believe technology and 3d art tools are better off in the long run without large-language involvement. This opinion comes from being in the software industry for over 20 years, and having the experience and knowledge to recognize something harmful when I see it.
But I suspect you aren’t interested in that, and are just lashing out in bad faith.
Genetic fallacy, appeal to authority fallacy.
south park i thought this was america dot jpg
s/large-language/large-language-model/
I have been more disturbed by the tenor of the blowback than the relationship with Anthropic.
Very good news indeed.
I’m really glad they changed their mind about that decision.
Kick them out altogether, what’s wrong with you? Anyone pushing any sort of “ai” rubbish needs to be laughed out of the room at once and promptly forgotten about. They all need to understand very clearly that they’re irrelevant and that is not going to change.
Here’s a simple truth. Over the last few years billions have been invested in Ai. The biggest studios have invested. The biggest software developers have invested. All that time Blender Foundation has operated on a little more than five million euros annually, driven by some corporate handouts and 1% of the user base coughing up a measly $5 month. Annually there’s the big to-do about supporting Blender through community donations, their donations spike for a month or two and then go back to baseline.
There are a team of developers and artists in Amsterdam right now working for 1/3 of what similarly employed professionals are making in the big studios or software companies because of the love of the project and a loyalty to the users. Ton as CEO of the Blender foundation took home an annual salary of 120 000 euros, as CEO. That is roughly $180 000 converted to my local currency. For perspective, a film set PA working on a year long film shoot can earn $120 000 with less responsibility and significantly fewer expectations of greatness.
Am I an AI supporter? Not really. Do I use it daily? Again, nope. Am I scared it will take my job? Not at all. All those big studios and software devs that were the spearhead singing the praises of AI two years ago are already realizing the limits imposed on AI and they’re backing off their investment. Why? Shareholder dividends. The big gamble on make more profit with fewer bodies they sold them early on came up flat so now they are going to have to explain the losses and why the payouts are smaller this year. The difference is they’re not broadcasting to the world they made a mistake and they don’t care what the user base thinks, not unless those users pony up with a million dollars in shares held, then maybe you get an opinion, but probably not.
Blender is in survival mode year after year. One or two bad fiscal years and some bad press could very well spell the end of Blender. Then again, it’s open source, so let’s say the worst case happens and Blender Foundation shutters its doors .. how long do you think it would take Adobe or Maxon or Microsoft to release their own branded Blender clone for $35USD/month, an asset store that gouges like Fab and a closed development eco-system where only pay-to-play devs are allowed at the table and the whole community gets thrown back into the affordability loop and have to rely on pirated software? You think the fallout at Superhive was something …?
I got an email a couple of weeks ago about Anthropic hemorrhaging money, saying they may not make it to the end of 2027 without something changing in their model. Then the bit popped up about Blender/Anthropic … I read it as a company circling the bowl and latching on to another company that is getting much better press and is moving upward .. oh and a fat ass tax receipt to offset their losses. What was Blender Foundation getting? A much needed dump of operating capital that would keep the doors open another couple of years. I didn’t once think that Blender was going to become the next Midjourney, the thought never crossed my mind, because IT’S BLENDER FOUNDATION … if Anthropic tried don’t you think that the executive team at HQ would hand back the money, say thanks but no thanks, and publish a presser about “the amicable split due to non-converging goals and ambitions.” How many years has Francesco been at Blender Foundation? Long enough that he was picked by Ton himself to take the helm and with confidence … Ton is still Chairman, do you not think he had some input on the partnership?!
Everyone is a CEO until stuff like this comes along, then the chatter proves why CEOs last 7-10 years before burning out and moving on to gardening with their severance. AI as a worker replacement is stupid, listening to the Elons of the world is even dumber. AI is a tool, no different than the suggested searches you get in your browser. AI marketing is there to scare people and sell shares.
@jns .. been in the software industry 20 years? Well statistically then you get paid more today than Ton ever has. I was working as a software dev when the dot com bubble burst … millions losing their retirement savings over night, not just their jobs. Companies that had employees for decades changing the locks on the doors and leaving lawyers business cards where employees would enter for work. In my city and company alone, 2500 people locked out overnight, 15 000 more in the coming months with some stranded in foreign countries for months without severance.
@nikki .. what is irrelevant is grand sweeping statements and tribalism, you just need to look at the US today to see how well that works. You want to tell Blender how to run their business? Get together a group of investors, form an LLC and become a corporate development sponsor. I mean at the root of it, if you really want the old Blender UI back and that’s where you’re happiest … the source code is there for the cherry picking, have at it.
This whole thing is ridiculous and immature. Blender is a business. A business remains competitive ONLY through being profitable. Blender, up until recent years has been the disregarded skinny kid trying out for the footie squad. Always bullied by the bigger kids on the pitch … well now, Blender has gone through a growth spurt and hit the gym and playing with the chip on their shoulder earned from years of being overlooked and kept in their place. Now Blender is taking the tack of “better the devil you know,” and capitalizing on short attention spans of a public usually enticed by shiny new things. They are striking deals for capital influx at a time when the industry is taking about Blender in a positive and alternative way. Blender has seen what resting on its laurels does and not embracing, or at least entertaining, the future and remaining part of the conversation instead of becoming an industry footnote like Lightwave or Amiga.
I’ll leave with this; would you pay $2/month to use Blender? If that was imposed on you next year would there be this uproar and a user base wide walk out? If that is the straw that would end a long term relationship with this company, then you need to stop and ask yourself very seriously … “Would I go to work for free everyday because that’s what our loyal base demands?” If your answer to that question is unequivocally, “No.” My rebuttal is why do you ask that of Blender Foundation and demand they authorize every growth opportunity with their 20+ million user base worldwide, 99% of whom donate squat and still demand cutting edge technology.
If you aren’t willing to work for free, then neither should they. Francesco and the executive team are a hell of a lot smarter than most give them credit for AND 1000% more transparent than 99.9% of similarly positioned companies out there. I’m looking forward to the day I get to go to work at a studio that lists Blender expertise as a #1 requirement and Maya, ZBrush, Adobe as nice to haves but not deal breakers.