Anthropic invests $1.5M in the Python Software Foundation

  a) the huge influx of beginners into IT,
  b) lots of intro material available in Python and 
  c) having a simple way to run your script and get feedback (same as PHP)

I say that as someone urging people to look beyond Python when they master the basics of programming.

shadowgovt7• 6 months ago

Python has a terseness that is hard to rival. I think that was a major selling point: its constructs and use of whitespace mean that a valid Python program looks pretty close to the pseudo-code one might write to reason out the problem before writing it in another language.

pansa23• 6 months ago

AFAICT Python basically is a [statically-]typed language nowadays. Most people are using MyPy or an alternative typechecker, and the community frowns on those who aren’t.

shadowgovt7• 6 months ago

It's a pretty nice best-of-both-worlds arrangement. The type information is there, but the program still runs without it (unless one is doing something really fancy, since it does actually make a runtime construct that can be introspected; some ORMs use the static type data to figure out database-to-object bindings). So you can go without types for prototyping, and then when you're happy with your prototype you can let mypy beat you up until the types are sound. There is a small nonzero cost to using the types at runtime (since they do create metadata that doesn't get dropped like in most languages with a static compilation step, like C++ or TypeScript).

I can name an absolute handful of languages I've used that have that flexibility. Common LISP comes to mind. But in general you get one or the other option.

embedding-shape8• 6 months ago

Most people are using MyPy or an alternative typechecker, and the community frowns on those who aren’t.

That's not like a widespread/by-default/de-facto standard across the ecosystem, by a wide margin. Browse popular/trending Python repositories and GitHub sometime and I guess you can see.

Most of the AI stuff released is still basically using conda or pip for dependencies, more times than not, they don't even share/say what Python version they used. It's basically still the wild west out there.

Never had anyone "frown" towards me for not using MyPy or any typechecker either, although I get plenty of that from TS fans when I refuse to adopt TS.

desireco42• 6 months ago

Why is this getting downvoted... it is true. Also it is true that dynamic languages (like Ruby ;) and Python) are more efficient with tokens, like significantly then types like C, C++ or such. But Javascript and Typescript are using twice the tokens of Ruby for example and Clojure is even more efficient, obviosly I would add.

minimaxir• 6 months ago

It's not incorrect, but in the context of the given Hacker News submission it reads as "why fund Python at all?"

oefrha• 6 months ago

Just recently I heard that they can donate to “typed languages” too, a donation to one language does’t preclude other donations, and given their cash injections they have a few $1.5m’s to spare.

dude250711• 6 months ago

For vibe code, since it's not important whether the output works, JavaScript is even better.

senko• 6 months ago

Source: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/12/anthropic-invests-in-py...

dang• 6 months ago

Link added above. Thanks!

hdjdndndba• 6 months ago

This makes sense given how much of the current AI ecosystem is built on top of Python. I hope this helps the foundation improve security for everyone who relies on these libraries.

bbor5• 6 months ago

For anyone who isn’t aware/remembering, this is certainly made with the security of PyPi in mind, python’s main package repository.

NPM is the other major source of issues (congrats for now, `cargo`!), and TIL that NPM is A) a for-profit startup (??) and B) acquired by Microsoft (????). In that light, this gift seems even more important, as it may help ensure that relative funding differences going forward don’t make PyPi an outsized target!

(Also makes me wonder if they still have a Microsoft employee running the PSF… always thought that was odd.)

AFAIU the actual PSF development team is pretty small and focused on CPython (aka language internals), so I’m curious how $750,000/year changes that in the short term…

EDIT: there’s a link below with a ton more info. This gift augments existing gifts from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Citi, and they soft-commit to a cause:

  Planned projects include creating new tools for automated proactive review of all packages uploaded to PyPI, improving on the current process of reactive-only review. We intend to create a new dataset of known malware that will allow us to design these novel tools, relying on capability analysis.

simonw2• 6 months ago

(Also makes me wonder if they still have a Microsoft employee running the PSF… always thought that was odd.)

You might be confusing the Python Steering Council - responsible for leadership of Python language development - with the PSF non-profit there.

The PSF is lead by a full-time executive director who has no other affiliation, plus an elected board of unpaid volunteer directors (I'm one of them).

Microsoft employees occasionally get voted into the board, but there is a rule to make sure a single company doesn't have more than 2 representatives on the board at any one time,

The board also elects a chair/president - previously that was Dawn Wages who worked at Microsoft for part of that time (until March 2025 - Dawn was chair up to October), today it's Jannis Leidel from Anaconda.

Meanwhile the Python steering council is entirely separate from the PSF leadership, with their own election mechanism voted on by Python core contributors. They have five members, none of whom currently work for Microsoft (but there have been Microsoft employees in the past.)

jjtheblunt• 6 months ago

Microsoft was serious about supporting Python as far back as 2006, because IronPython was a real effort in Redmond. (I'm wondering how they think of it now.)

oceansky• 6 months ago

Very good for my career too as someone with plenty python experience

zoobab• 6 months ago

I did not know you could make donations with a string attached ("improve security")...

epistasis• 6 months ago

The vast majority of donations to, say, universities are made with a specific purpose, and that happens with a lot of non-profits too. The recipient doesn't have to accept the donation, of course, but if they do they track exactly how it was spent.

frankwiles• 6 months ago

It's super common with non-profits. Obviously they would prefer no strings attached but some light strings are usually not a problem for most non-profits.

bbor5• 6 months ago

And they come in a variety of bindingness. I didn’t notice any details in this link which makes me think this is mostly a handshake deal, but it wouldn’t be at all unusual for there to be some auditing mechanisms on a quarterly/yearly cycle.

For example, Wikimedia just recently claimed that they can’t chase some political project that critics wanted them to because most of their funds are earmarked-for/invested-in specific projects. So it does happen with US-based tech non-profits to at least some extent.

jobs_throwaway• 6 months ago

Of course you can. The vast majority of donations of this magnitude come with strings attached, be it how the money is spent, access to leadership/events, etc

ssutch3• 6 months ago

Yes, and at least the strings they attached are productive palatable unlike some other organizations: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.h...

mcintyre1994• 6 months ago

That link shows the significance of this Anthropic donation too:

$1.5 million over two years would have been quite a lot of money for us, and easily the largest grant we’d ever received.

larkost• 6 months ago

My wife's previous job was as an accountant with the endowment foundation at a mid-sized public university (San Jose State University). A lot of her time was spent making sure that the spending from the endowments many different funds corresponded to the rules that the donors had given when donating that money. Much of that was working with groups to shift spending around between accounts when they invariably made "mistakes".

One of her biggest projects was shepherding a large group of very old donations through a legal process to remove provisions in the donation agreements that were now illegal. In these cases the donors were long deceased, and the most common rule that needed to be changed was targeting race or ethnicity (e.g.: funds setup to help black people, or Irish, etc...).

The sheer number of different variations on "donor intent", or even just the wording on that legal document was astounding. There was always a tension between my wife's group and the group that was bringing in the money ("stewardship"), her group wanted things to be simpler and the "stewarding" group wanted nothing to get in the way of donations. It was remarkably similar to the tensions between sales and engineering in many software firms.

Loren-PSF• 6 months ago

Hello! PSF staffer/author of the linked post here. To be explicit, the Anthropic donation is actually "no strings attached," or in non-profit parlance "unrestricted," but with a handshake agreement that they hope to improve security with this sponsorship. So the gift will enable us to do security work we've wanted to do and it is our intention to do that, but Anthropic didn't formally earmark the money, which gives us a great deal more flexibility plus a lower accounting burden, and I'm personally very grateful for that.

htrp• 6 months ago

Looking at you Deepmind and OpenAI

surajrmal• 6 months ago

Google sponsors the python foundation as per this page: https://www.python.org/psf/sponsors/

godelski• 6 months ago

Kinda crazy that the top level "Visionary Sponsor" is a donation level of $160k. There's also 0 sponsors at the $100k level. I was also surprised to see Netflix at $5k and Jane Street at $17k. Maybe they should give more but there's a lot of names absent and that says more

neom• 6 months ago

Seems like a good time to throw out a reminder regarding "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure" by Nadia Asparouhova. While she may have published it in 2016, it's still relevant today and speaks to the need for the private sector generally (looking at you VC firms) to support and understand the open source work, hours of unfunded labor, powering our societies.

https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep...

godzillabrennus• 6 months ago

Big Tech should really be footing the bill here as well as large established VC firms.

ajross3• 6 months ago

To a large extent they do and always have. It's not as broad or fair as it should be[1], but for almost any economically important project all the major contributors and maintainers are on the payroll of one of the big tech interests or a foundation funded by them.

The hippies writing that software may not be compensated at the level you'd expect given the value they provide, but they'll never go hungry.

[1] LLVM and Linux get more cash than they can spend. GNU stuff is comparatively impoverished because everyone assumes they'd do it for free anyway. Stuff that ships on a Canonical desktop or RHEL default install gets lots of cash but community favorites like KDE need to make their own way, etc... Also just to be clear: node is filled with povertyware and you should be extremely careful what you grab from npm.

alain94040• 6 months ago

Really simple fix: social pressure and expectations should be that every company that uses open source pays a fixed amount of their revenue (is 0.1% low enough to be negligible for the companies). Companies that don't should shunned.

whilenot-dev2• 6 months ago

*by Nadia Eghbal

EDIT: or are you rather thinking about the book Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software?

embedding-shape8• 6 months ago

Actually, since 2022, Nadia Asparouhova :)

From a 2022 email:

(P.S. I have a new last name! Still transitioning everything over, but I’m now Nadia Asparouhova.)

twoquestions• 6 months ago

Glad to see Anthropic continuing to invest in the longevity and quality of their open-source dependencies!

If you missed it, they bought Bun a while back, which is what Claude Code is built in: https://bun.sh/blog/bun-joins-anthropic

geodel• 6 months ago

Wow. Just came to know from your comment. Not sure if it was covered here on HN. I totally missed it.

NSPG911• 6 months ago

It happened quite a while back, most of us knew what direction this was going (Claude Code uses Bun, OpenCode uses Bun, they need Bun to work the best for Claude Code)

qaq• 6 months ago

Still crazy how little investment goes to Python given how critical it is to the ecosystem.

mixmastamyk10• 6 months ago

Poor management has played a role. They refused to invest in packaging to the extent that a separate company (astral) had to do it for them. Bugs closed for years with the excuse “we’re only volunteers.” Meanwhile, “outreach” was funded for several million a year. Not confidence inspiring. Maybe would have improved if the funds had been spent more appropriately.

Similar story with Mozilla.

embedding-shape8• 6 months ago

I don't know much about the Linux Foundation if I'm being honest, even though I've been a 24/7 Linux user for decades, but they seemingly don't have the same image in the ecosystem, at least not close to how people see Mozilla today.

Why is that? Is there lessons to be learned from the Linux Foundation how to actually effectively and responsibly manage that sort of money, in those types of projects?

teh644• 6 months ago

Where are you getting these numbers? Looking at the PSFs Report for 2024 [0], 50% of their expenses went to pycon. Would you consider that outreach? I believe conferences are very important as part of the health of a language, and reading the definition of outreach[1], I would not classify the conference as that. The second highest amount of expenses (27.1%) went to (surprise!) "Packaging Work Group/Infrastructure/Other", i.e. pypi, pip etc... "Outreach & Education" was only 2.8% of 12.9% of expenses, i.e. 0.3612%, which is $17846 (actual dollars, not thousands like in the report.)

[0] https://www.python.org/psf/annual-report/2024/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outreach

jborean933• 6 months ago

They refused to invest in packaging to the extent that a separate company (astral) had to do it for them

uv didn't just happen in a vacuum, there has been lots of investment in the Python packaging ecosystem that has enabled it (and other tools) to try and improve the shortcomings of Python and packaging.

There's PEP 518 [1] for build requirements, PEP 600 [2] for manylinux wheels, PEP 621 [3] for pyproject.toml, PEP 656 [4] for musl wheels platform identifiers, PEP 723 [5] for inline script metadata.

Without all this uv wouldn't be a thing and we would be stuck with pip and setuptools or a bunch of more bandaid hacks on top making the whole thing brittle.

[1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0518/ [2] https://peps.python.org/pep-0600/ [3] https://peps.python.org/pep-0621/ [4] https://peps.python.org/pep-0654/ [5] https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/

1970-01-01• 6 months ago

As far as I'm aware, Python was only recently (2020s) taught in most schools, so that's the reason it wasn't and isn't well funded. Schools will stick with legacy languages far beyond their market lifetimes, as that is what the instructors know best. So it's not that it isn't well funded, it's that it's still early in terms of global popularity. As we just witnessed, the funding is just now coming in big drops.

woodruffw• 6 months ago

MIT was already using Python by 2009[1]; I think it's been one of the "standard" teaching languages for well over a decade at this point.

(By most metrics, Python became "big" in the mid-late 2000s, which is why the Python 3 transition was so painful.)

[1] https://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/2110/why-mit-switched-f...

elevation• 6 months ago

For many of us the language itself has been feature complete for decades.

hamandcheese• 6 months ago

I must be the only one in here who thinks $1.5M is a small sum compared to Anthropic's size and the amount of value they have gotten out of Python. Good press is cheaper than I thought.

defraudbah2• 6 months ago

that was my first thought too, $1.5M is peanuts for Anthropic, however $1.5M is better than nothing, so it worth some PR too. Good they do, I think we have to encourage companies to do it, shaming will not help.

tomComb• 6 months ago

You are right, it is. But it would be a mistake for us to use this opportunity to attack them for it.

We should applaud their donation today, and at another time assess the meager contributions of many companies that should be shamed.

DrBazza• 6 months ago

Every single financial institution on Wall Street, the City of London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Dubai and so on, uses Python. Very few contribute.

I've worked at a few that use the 'mold' linker to dramatically reduce their build times. Again, very few contribute. In this particular case, I managed to get one former employer to make a donation.

But the list goes on.

Short arms, deep pockets, as the saying goes.

etruong42• 6 months ago

Money has limited impact and has all sorts of drawbacks.

A more impactful change from firms might be to celebrate and reward community contributions of their own employees. This can establish a more productive culture than just money. If an engineering company is willing to donate money (yay!), perhaps consider making sure that employees are celebrated for contributions they make in a manner that is similar to how we currently celebrate monetary transactions.

For an example of the opposite, Google laid off their entire Python team, something that also made HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40171125

1stranger• 6 months ago

All people do here is complain.

notyourwork• 6 months ago

We can both applaud the effort and indicate it’s not enough. Two things can be true simultaneously.

german_dong• 6 months ago

I mean, it's 1.5M more than the foundation knows what to do with.

defraudbah2• 6 months ago

don't compare everyone with your mom, shepard

Fokamul• 6 months ago

It's easy to donate, since it's not their money. They are not profitable. Just Nvidia's money, they're paying themselves for new GPUs and datacenters.

returnInfinity2• 6 months ago

They are probably trying to build influence. Why is a startup that is burning cash donating money?

jedberg• 6 months ago

Of course they are. These donations usually come out of the marketing budget. And it's working, we're talking about them.

But also they rely heavily on Python and want to support the ecosystem.

nedbat6• 6 months ago

Is it so hard to imagine that they do it because the PSF's work is important and they want to support them? All the AI labs depend hugely on the Python ecosystem and infrastructure. Startups burning cash spend on many things that are important to them.

red2awn• 6 months ago

They are heavily focused on code. Claude Code likely generates 100 of millions lines of Python a day, make the language a little bit better with $1.5M is extremely high leverage.

johnisgood2• 6 months ago

Care to elaborate on how $1.5M makes Python better?

rented_mule• 6 months ago

And if this money improves PyPI security (part of the focus), that reduces the chance of Claude Code adding malicious packages to a code base (a well publicized case of this could be a big PR headache for Anthropic). This donation is likely much better leverage than trying to somehow add mitigation at the Claude Code level.

amykhar• 6 months ago

Businesses should definitely support the open source projects that they use. I'm still astounded that professional developers seem so adverse to paying for the tools and libraries that they use to make their own money.

nikcub• 6 months ago

really find a negative in it ey - what type of donation and from who would be acceptable to you to fund the python foundation?

returnInfinity2• 6 months ago

This is a step to take control and move in a direction that will profit them greatly.

May or may not benefit the community.

heliumtera• 6 months ago

It's certainly better than absolute nothing!

mac-attack• 6 months ago

Maybe I'm the only one realizing it's exactly the same amount they were due to receive from the US Govt until the Trump administration said they were too woke.

globular-toast• 6 months ago

"Over two years". Does that mean the foundation has to do what they want it to do or else the tap stops?

skeledrew5• 6 months ago

Well the funds are earmarked for security matters, so it should be spent regarding that.

nikanj• 6 months ago

Internal forecasts indicate Anthropic’s annualized revenue run-rate could be between about $20 billion and $26 billion in 2026. Let's shoot for the middle, $23 billion

According to multiple articles, Anthropic expects to reduce its cash burn to around one-third of revenue in 2026.

This implies total spending is roughly revenue + cash burn ≈ $23 billion + $7.7 billion ≈ $30.7 billion

When you divide the total spending to the length of the whole year, $1.5 million would sustain Anthropic for roughly 0.43 hours, or about 26 minutes.

nedbat6• 6 months ago

It does seem small at Anthropic scale. But instead of faulting them for contributing "so little", maybe we can point to the thousands of large companies that are doing nothing.

Anthropic invests $1.5M in the Python Software Foundation

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