Missed opportunity to call this a "Phil-Anthropic" partnership. The word doesn't appear <i>once</i> in TFA. Highly disappointed.<p>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 <i>spending their money faster than it grows.</i>
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!
> Their biggest problem is spending their money faster than it grows.<p>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.<p>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 ;)
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wheresyoured.at/</a>
I think a tell that many of these deals likely aren't real and are basically just PR is the numbers are <i>super</i> round and digestable.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>But when he delves in the numbers, his arguments are very solid (and I am still to see someone counter him on that).
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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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).<p>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.
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.
Is that $200M with the prompt cache at five minutes, or one hour?
Let me guess ...<p>Gates Foundation and/or principal actors attached to the Gates Foundation have equity stakes in Anthropic ...<p>... and they have made a decision to direct charitable funds toward the committed purchase of Anthropic tokens.<p>Do I have that right ?<p>Very much like Huang charitable foundation committing to purchase Coreweave services[1] ... which Huang has equity stakes in ?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/nvidia-ceos-foundation-buys-108-million-ai-computing-coreweave-donates-it-2026-05-13/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/nvidia-ceos-foun...</a>
So... Does the Gates foundation get an equity stake?
Claude is officially dead to me now.
The gates foundation: money laundering and influence purchasing for billionaires who occasionally want to slip their wives antibiotics.
This is almost certainly gross. Don’t be evil, Anthropic.
I'm a fan of Anthropic's product but this is incredibly tone deaf and makes me reconsider the judgement of their leadership.
Welp, time to make sure your triple F reserves are stocked up.
Evil & Evil unite.<p>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.
Gross. Why work with an Epstein op?<p>Edit: to those downvoting, even Melinda Gates left the Gates Foundation over Epstein. Not sure why my statement is even remotely controversial.
Pedos Foundation
The Gates Foundation has done measurably terrible work harming public education in the US.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
[dead]
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)
The "Melinda" bit already dropped? Why did she leave him? Great guy to do a partnership with the same-named foundations of.<p>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.<p>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!