Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/

by Philpax • 3 months ago

256 217 3 months ago

blender.org

faangguyindia2• 3 months ago

Any ideas why anthropic is interested in blender funding?

kevin_thibedeau• 3 months ago

3D printer censorship

ripbozo• 3 months ago

good PR, probably

twoodfin• 3 months ago

Presumably because they think agents will become the dominant primary users of tools like Blender, and want a seat at the architectural table to help accelerate that & create useful synergies with Anthropic products and models?

The press release calls out the Blender Python API, specifically, which makes sense for agentic use.

shuvrojit• 3 months ago

I think maybe they want to expand 3d creations and modeling for future video gen with avatar type situation or maybe get into 3d game development.

CSSer• 3 months ago

This support will be dedicated towards Blender core development, to maintain and continuously improve foundational features like the Blender Python API

Pretty much spells it out. They have an interest in extending/supporting the ability for Claude/CC to use and interact with Blender. There may be gaps in endpoints that Anthropic needs to enable certain patterns of automated usage.

aitchnyu• 3 months ago

Anthropic CPO was in Figma's board and stayed there a day before Anthropic-Canva Figma-killer came up /s

usrusr• 3 months ago

When in doubt, dogfooding: "make us popular with the Internet crowd, take a look at what popular companies have done. Here's a budget you can use"

Chances are they were expecting the agent to spoon-feed hundreds of influencers.

x-complexity• 3 months ago

As literally stated in the second paragraph of the blog post:

This support will be dedicated towards Blender core development, to maintain and continuously improve foundational features like the Blender Python API, which enables developers and artists alike to extend and improve the software for custom workflows.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936552

dontblink• 3 months ago

I can imagine they would be interested in creating features to generate 3d models.

shevy-java3• 3 months ago

Oh yes, I think this part is easy to see and perhaps even logical. But I also don't think this part is the problem. After all, generating 3d models is primarily a technical consideration. I don't think the technical prowess of software is an issue in this here.

riidom4• 3 months ago

That's already blowing up on Mastodon. Blenderartist silent for now. Won't stay like that for very long.

I wonder, if Ton was involved in that decision, or if it's only Francesco. Could turn out to be a very unlucky start into the leadership role.

shevy-java3• 3 months ago

Aha - so that decision was not a consensus or community made one? I really don't know right now; no clue about the internals at blender. But that would be interesting ... I can see the headlines "Blender community sold to Anthropic. Forks starting in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ..."

tibbydudeza3• 3 months ago

The militant open-source crowd never disappoints - rather burn down than build up.

riidom4• 3 months ago

Sponsorship decisions are not community polls, never have been.

And the worries about "blender just being sold to xyz..." have been around forever. Always wrong. People with AMD cards were screaming when Nvidia became sponsor, and other way round.

It is more about the signal sent, in this case.

For everyone who is interested, here is the mastodon thread: https://mastodon.social/@Blender/116482997785333001 (it is just like to be expected though)

conorbergin• 3 months ago

I doubt a fork would ever happen, Blender, being computer graphics software, has a huge knowledge gap between it's developers and it's users.

shevy-java3• 3 months ago

I have mixed feeling about this. Guess they can need the money ... but still. Data goes to Anthropic here. It also will buy influence in some ways, I am sure about that. We could see this with rubygems.org - when shopify threatened to cut funding some months ago, suddenly chaos erupted. Money buys influence, this is easy to see how.

tibbydudeza3• 3 months ago

Nowhere is that mentioned - perhaps Dario loves making 3D doodles on his days off :).

panzi7• 3 months ago

No data goes to Anthropic from Blender. At all. See also: https://fund.blender.org/funding-policy/

And Blender tries to get funding from many different donors so that no single one can have any sway over them. Anthropic, as disgusting as they are, are just one more donor. Epic, Nvidia, Google, CoreWeave are also patrons. I don't worry about that donation.

sassymuffinz10• 3 months ago

"No data goes to Anthropic from Blender."

You know, for now...

muhuk3• 3 months ago

There will be community backlash. And it will not be uncalled for. Sad news.

tibbydudeza3• 3 months ago

Sadly so and it is the people who don't even fund open source projects.

Someone1234• 3 months ago

Yep. Anthropic's motives are obviously self-interested (Cluade <-> Blender integration), but I'm not donating to Blender, are you? That's the problem, we all want Blender to be able to pick and choose donations, but when all OSS is cash-strapped, it is easier said than done.

I'd prefer Blender get some additional funding out of this AI bubble at least.

magicalhippo3• 3 months ago

Clearly I'm out of the loop, why would it not be uncalled for?

KeplerBoy• 3 months ago

Because someone might argue blender is taking funding from an entity that wants to make proficient blender users obsolete.

ianm2182• 3 months ago

What do you mean?

echelon2• 3 months ago

A lot of 3D artists and VFX artists hate AI. Social media is full of them.

Some of them, like the illustrious MrDoob (behind Threejs), love AI and are all-in on it.

The VFX folks at Corridor Crew [1] have been leaning into AI for years now and showing a healthy attitude and path forward to using AI in workflows.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@CorridorCrew

panzi7• 3 months ago

I don't think they can tell Blender what to do. As such it's just more money for Blender! Yes, Anthropic can use the Python API to do their AI BS, but an improved Python API is also good for anyone else. This doesn't mean that Blender themselves are integrating any gen AI (if you don't already count the denoise filters). Do you really think Blender should have denied the donation?

muhuk3• 3 months ago

I think they should have, it does not align with their community. Could they have denied, I am not sure about the legalities.

Money is good. But not antagonizing your community (as an open source project) is better.

Raed667• 3 months ago

improve foundational features like the Blender Python API, which enables developers and artists alike

So they want claude to be able to talk to blender

giancarlostoro• 3 months ago

There's already an MCP for it, saw a post on LinkedIn the other day about it.

Not sure if this one was the one I saw, but Google gave me this one. You could use Claude Code to build things with Blender.

https://blender-mcp.com/

SyneRyder• 3 months ago

Anthropic just posted a video 1 hour ago of their own official MCP integration with Blender:

https://youtu.be/LZMWsZbZU5w

embedding-shape2• 3 months ago

You don't even need that, if your agent/harness can evaluate Python, it can trivially access the API through there and "import" basically.

riidom4• 3 months ago

https://www.blender.org/development/blender-lab-activity-rep...

riidom4• 3 months ago

With examples: https://www.blender.org/lab/mcp-server/

zeeveener• 3 months ago

Honestly, I think this is a stepping stone towards replacing industry CAD modeling tools.

AI _can_ work with 3D models already, but it's really bad at it. CAD requires an extra level of control and I think this is where I could see AI companies wanting to get a foot in the door.

e.g "Let's build an adapter between 2in BSP Male and 3/4in NPT Female threads with a third Hose Barb outlet with the following properties..."

daemonologist• 3 months ago

This might actually be quite nice - the Blender Python API is currently very useful and very touchy. Lots of differences in behavior in headless mode which are hard to debug (because you can't open the GUI to see what's happening, because that changes the behavior).

doctoboggan2• 3 months ago

Yes the blender API feels like it sits on top of the GUI rather than the GUI on top of the API. When you are writing scripts in the blender api you basically mechanically describe the steps you would take in the UI. It can be a little fragile at times.

I've used Claude to write some blender scripts and it's an excellent use case. I look forward to even better claude/blender interaction based on this annonuncement.

sailfast2• 3 months ago

There is already a Blender MCP. It works-ish! But could be a lot better in understanding 3D space.

As an amateur this is really exciting - but not sure about folks that are real pros at this stuff.

hirako20004• 3 months ago

I'm not a pro, but I've been unimpressed by LLMs driving blender. Was left unexcited. Must be torture for professional to read this thread.

JKCalhoun3• 3 months ago

We (I) need that.

"Some software" is approaching levels of complexity where, perhaps, it gets to a point where a human is barely able to even use it.

At the same time (brave new world) LLM assisted software opens up the possibility of levels of complexity we would not have considered before.

bergheim• 3 months ago

Why do we need that?

Art should demand more of the creator than the person experiencing it.

The alternative is 9 billion who cares slop things.

mossTechnician2• 3 months ago

I disagree that anyone should need LLMs for Blender, for example, because Blender is designed by people to be understood and used by people, even if it requires a learning curve. It sounds a bit dangerous to build new things we don't understand, or worse, reduce our understanding of what we currently use because (only after studying our use of the same technology) an LLM apears able to replicate it, mostly.

I'm reminded of Sam Altman's performative helplessness on Jimmy Kimmel, when he described being unable believe a baby without ChatGPT. That's something I believe humanity has been capable of doing for a good portion of its existence, and not something we should give up to the hands of a yet-unproven, yet-unprofitable technology.

adolph• 3 months ago

Yeah, Google has MuJoCo so it seems natural to get hooks into Blender.

MuBlE: MuJoCo and Blender simulation Environment and Benchmark for Task Planning in Robot Manipulation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02834

RobRivera• 3 months ago

Frankly, I love the idea of an automation engine printing out tangible works. I actually build spritesheets that way! Load a bunch of individual gimp files as layers, set them offset by a given parameter, and boom, done!

Would be rad to incorporate some statistical procedurally generated designs based on my own aparatus.

What I do not want to see is this realm of LLMs hijacking decades of hard work and consideration for integration channels to more tailor towards their LLMs, not for the diligent engineer.

If they want to put their tentacles as far as they want while making products more difficult to work with innovation of a different color, they are making enemies out of, at least me.

conductr• 3 months ago

I want claude to talk to blender, I personally hate using blender but love it's outputs

faangguyindia2• 3 months ago

Can't wait for Gimp automation, so i can finally start using it!

DeathArrow• 3 months ago

So Claude will soon do 3D modelling?

mempko• 3 months ago

I love blender. They should get all the money they need.

readitalready2• 3 months ago

It's because LLMs will soon start building real-world objects via CAD. This is the first step. Look at things like the Adam plugin for Onshape. Works great with Opus. It built a toy car for me with one prompt.

skybrian• 3 months ago

Haven’t used it but my understanding is that Blender isn’t really CAD. Is there a way to use it for CAD?

readitalready2• 3 months ago

All the CAD and modelings tools have their own scripting languages that LLMs can write to, so you can just use that directly without any built-in LLM support. There will probably be someone doing a pelican-on-a-bicycle for CAD.

brcmthrowaway2• 3 months ago

This looks interesting. Anything similar for FreeCAD?

post-it4• 3 months ago

I've been using it with OpenSCAD, which has the advantage of being entirely script-generated and so more easily understandable by AI.

adfm2• 3 months ago

If this is the case, they’ll want to improve the NURBS support within Blender. You can get some amazing results with subd, but digital twins require accuracy and you get that with NURBS geometry. Fortunately, Blender supports it already, it just needs some attention to tooling.

throw_m239339• 3 months ago

Blender isn't really made for CAD at all, although there are few CAD plugins. It's more for artistic modelling like MAYA or Cinema3D.

There already are LLM plugins for Blenders and prompt integration for model generation, rigging and co.

adfm2• 3 months ago

MAYA has extensive NURBS tools, which means it can import and export CAD data natively. While Blender does support basic NURBS geometry, it lacks tooling to fully support it.

If the idea is to support Blender for use with “Digital Twins” or “World Models” then the first step is to start with accurate geometry. Anything less is slop.

rectang2• 3 months ago

Will Blender start allowing Anthropic to train on your art automatically unless you opt-out?

_flux2• 3 months ago

How could that possibly work?

rectang2• 3 months ago

I once thought the same about all the copyrighted works on which LLMs are currently trained. Surely they can't just hoover everything up? Haha, silly me.

I understand that creating an LLM itself is transformative, but an LLM trained on copyrighted works remains capable of generating derivative works, which eventually will result in successful copyright lawsuits against LLM users who redistribute those derivative works.

In advance of that day, the great race is to build a licensed corpus as aggressively as possible (see Github's latest decision to opt in Copilot usage). Even if Blender doesn't send your data on every save, various options can be developed, such as publishing to a Blender-controlled public channel.

magicalhippo3• 3 months ago

No. You can read about what the various sponsorship levels entails here[1].

Blender already has ton of other Corporate Patron level sponsors, such as Netflix, Meta, Intel, BMW, Adobe and others.

[1] https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/

shrinks99• 3 months ago

There's absolutely no precident for Blender Foundation sponsorships leading to such things... So no, they probably won't do that.

brazukadev• 3 months ago

Only for the SaaS customers

shimman• 3 months ago

I see we're now entering the "Sam Bankman-Fried" stage of buying goodwill.

Rob_Polding• 3 months ago

These AI companies need to be kept away from Open Source projects. A sad day for Blender :(

echelon2• 3 months ago

This is not bad news.

If Blender doesn't grow AI capabilities, its utility in the future will be severely degraded.

If you haven't seen 3D mesh, texturing, PBR, and retopo tools, they're getting extremely good.

bicx3• 3 months ago

They already have corporate sponsorships from Google, Meta, Nvidia, and other big companies. Anthropic is just joining the list. This is actually good for Blender.

whywhywhywhy2• 3 months ago

Weird attitude when 3D artists LOVE AI powered denoising and upscaling. Praying for the day AI makes it so I never have to UV unwrap a mesh again.

slopinthebag5• 3 months ago

Yes, Claude is the AI doing my denoising. I keep running out of tokens with my 4k renders.

AI is a nebulous term. AI denoisers are not the same thing as an LLM or image gen model, the ire is directed at LLMs and not AI denoisers because they are completely different things.

sassymuffinz10• 3 months ago

Wasn't this one called "machine learning" for denoising and upscaling? That's completely different from an LLM replacing your job (after being trained on your work without permission).

Jtarii• 3 months ago

Denoisers and upscalers don't make authorial decisions. This is a stupid comparison.

yrds96• 3 months ago

It's clear that the beef Artists vs AI is clearly about genAI and not about other kind of AI

postalcoder• 3 months ago

The press watching side of me only has questions. Why was this published by Blender and not Anthropic? What does this actually mean? That the blender team gets free claude code max subscriptions?

jorams• 3 months ago

What it means is here[1]. Anthropic is paying €240k a year and in return they get some marketing in the form of a press release and a website mention, as well as someone to talk to.

[1] https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/

mirekrusin• 3 months ago

Blender [0] and also Autodesk Fusion [1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZMWsZbZU5w

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gen8rG40ntA

goldenarm• 3 months ago

I prefer that outcome to them acquiring OSS projects and shutting them down once the bubble collapses.

dagmx• 3 months ago

Almost every AI lab I talk to that deals with 3D has built their pipelines around Blender.

This is unsurprising as a general development other than Anthropic doesn’t have a 3D model generation framework.

I don’t think this is to create MCP servers necessarily but rather to improve the blender pipeline further.

dsign• 3 months ago

Can you imagine going to a football match and second-guessing which are the players who look human, but skin-deep are actually androids made at a factory? This is what it feels like with music and literature right now with so much AI. There are some pockets where you still can say "that's human-made", like 3D-rendered feature films with some particular artistic direction. That, it seems, AI companies also want it to go the way of the dodo.

squigz2• 3 months ago

like 3D-rendered feature films with some particular artistic direction.

This is a really interesting example. Why do you foresee artistic direction going away as a result of AI? More importantly: why didn't we lose that with the transitions through the years of special effects - i.e., from practical to 3D-rendered?

nemomarx2• 3 months ago

It's not an uncommon opinion that we did lose artistic direction and aesthetics by moving to vfx - the ability to edit more and more things in post to change the direction or plot of a film personally seems like it's enabled more design by committee in marvel films, etc

tempaccount5050• 3 months ago

The pearl clutching over the pedigree of art is getting tiring. No one has really ever cared. Most mainstream music is written by corporate teams. Elvis didn't write his own music. Frank Sinatra didn't write his own music. Nearly all pop artists don't. But suddenly, people are now clamoring for art, but they never gave a shit to begin with. Most people can't tell AI written music from anything else if a human performer played it. Most of it is better than any local bands anyway. Tired of people pretending they care.

slopinthebag5• 3 months ago

Did Frank Sinatra have an AI write his music? Did Elvis?

If not, doesn't your argument entirely miss the point?

danny_codes• 3 months ago

It’s subjective, because it’s art. There’s no right answer.

If you like listening to AI generated content, then that’s fine! I’m glad you found something you enjoy.

For me, I consume art because I want to understand other people. For example, when I go to an art museum I want to emotionally connect with the artist: to feel what they were feeling, or understand an idea they’re conveying. I have little desire to emotionally connect with stochastic token sampling. It seems a vapid way to spend time

bjelkeman-again• 3 months ago

I arrange gigs with real bands playing music. At least that will take quite a while to replace with AI. I am curious to see if we will get a backlash eventually around the content. It will probably be a mix of everything.

Storytelling didn’t go away when the theatre was invented. Theatre didn’t go away when cinema arrived. Cinema wasn’t replaced when radio arrived, ad that wasn’t completely replace by TV, etc. It is a mix of things these days and it will probably remain that way.

flipthefrog• 3 months ago

If Frank Sinatra had Ai he woulnt have had to perform any of that slop by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill, Rodgers & Hammerstein and other composers no one cares about

ncr1004• 3 months ago

Check out this album, especially Bernard's Boogie, and Horses.

- https://donnybenet.bandcamp.com/album/il-basso

Totally not written by Google.

NitpickLawyer2• 3 months ago

Yesterday I saw a clip that went "viral" of a few hogs chased by a humanoid robot somewhere in Poland. I had to watch it a few times to figure out if it was real or generated. I still wasn't 100% sure. Asked around in a group, and apparently it's been widely reported on regular news, so I guess it's real? But we're slowly getting to the point where you won't be able to tell, especially from a short clip on a phone.

ncr1004• 3 months ago

Yes, and tx for sharing the experience of the hog video - recommended to me too and I chose not to click, as I did not want the frustration of seeing another "tech run amuck" example, of tech disrupting YET ANOTHER norm.

Relatedly, IMO "trust" as a word / concept is deserving of being reevaluated nowadays.

E.g. I don't know that you, NitpickLawyer, are a real person. And when I go through the mental exercise of inventing the details, proofs, and evidence I'd need in order to satisfy my doubt, I never succeed until I reach the physical-contact-with-NitpickLawyer condition.

So I think we need to evaluate what is necessary for oneself to operate in society, separate from these untrustable things .. such as media / news reports, and all the other things I just don't want to worry about, right now. :-(

polski-g• 3 months ago

AI is currently the worse it will ever be. 18 months ago it couldn't draw hands.

augment_me7• 3 months ago

No-one cares dude. People like good enough, convenient things that serve their entertainment needs, which is shaped by said entertainment, so there is not really an issue here.

PoorRustDev• 3 months ago

“No one cares” except for all the people bringing up that they care.

thinkingtoilet3• 3 months ago

I care deeply. It is not single-handedly going to destroy humanity. However, we are clearly on a course where people are more isolated, less challenged, less social, and very very very unhappy. Music is one of those things that can really bring people together. If we flood the zone with AI music (or any other art form) we will slowly edge out the humans who are doing that. That is less new music. Less chances to come together. Less chances to dance together. It's a death by a thousand cuts. I, and many others, think it's worth fighting for because we want others to have the amazing experiences we're having.

DonHopkins3• 3 months ago

Can you imagine watching a movie, and not being able to tell which scenes have GC special effects and which don't? Oh no!!! GC totally ruins all movies!!! Even movies that don't use CG are ruined by the tension of dreading that they might, and wondering if they do, and doubting everything you see in the screen, even if they don't. CG has ruined everything!

post-it4• 3 months ago

I've been using Claude with OpenSCAD to generate some simple models with repetitive geometry (a set of d8 dice with braille on them for a scrabble-like game for blind children). It's really good, though often I have to send a screenshot to Claude or describe a geometry issue.

Having more native integration into Blender, which I'm already much more familiar with, will be fantastic.

squigz2• 3 months ago

I'm sure I'm not the only one who would appreciate hearing more about that game :)

post-it4• 3 months ago

This[0] is the original game. I downloaded the dice, made a list of letters for each die (I can't remember if I did this manually, I don't see a published list so I must have), and then I fiddled until I got something that looks decent and also printable. Each die face has the braille letter as well as a small English letter. Here's[1] my repo, I wasn't intending to make it public yet, so it still has the original creator's files in there and the README is autogenerated.

The biggest challenge at this point is figuring out how to make the dice print consistently. With each die face only having a few points of contact, they keep unsticking. What I'm trying now is cutting the dice in half, printing the halves, and then sticking them together with dowels.

[0] https://www.printables.com/model/821177-octobabble-a-word-ba...

[1] https://github.com/PeterFajner/braille_octobabble/

aurumque• 3 months ago

Similarly, I made an agent that lets Claude puppet OpenSCAD, generate screen shots, change the camera angle, etc. In general Claude seems to have a pretty good vision model that can create usable designs. It's also fun to let it make up new models of its own and then try to 3D print them.

testfrequency• 3 months ago

Anthropic right now internally (probably):

“We love art :P”

sassymuffinz10• 3 months ago

They love art so much they want to take the humanity out of it. The funny thing is these sociopaths at the AI companies can't even comprehend something that cannot be quantified in a spreadsheet.

Kye3• 3 months ago

Blender has an actual spreadsheet view. Everything model-related can be quantified in it.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/spreadshee...

bicx3• 3 months ago

Not sure why this is getting backlash. Just look at https://fund.blender.org. Other corporate sponsors are Google, Meta, Nvidia, Netflix, even Adidas.

This just means more support for a major OSS project.

bakugo5• 3 months ago

A lot of those companies likely sponsor it because they use it themselves, and actively benefit from its continued development. The incentives are at least somewhat aligned.

I doubt Anthropic has much use for such a tool internally. They're sponsoring it because they want to inject their slop into it and replace the people who do use it.

NitpickLawyer2• 3 months ago

They're sponsoring it because they want to inject their slop into it and replace the people who do use it.

Oh, noes, the horrors of democratising access to an expert tool. What will onshape do now, that the free one is accessible to oom more regular people that could use a 3d shape but don't have the time to learn a very complicated yet powerful tool?

I guess people have said the same about game engines / coding tools that help artists turn their vision into working, compiling games, right? Riiight?

dannyw• 3 months ago

I don't think any slop is getting injected into Blender:

Blender Foundation’s mission remains to empower artists with free/open source technology and tools. Yet, we also maintain APIs for individuals and corporations to extend Blender, also beyond what’s aligned with Blender’s mission. We consider this part of the Software Freedom that’s embodied with Blender’s GNU GPL license.

hbosch3• 3 months ago

There is no scenario where more people using Blender is bad for Blender.

jonas212• 3 months ago

Or perhaps they're sponsoring it so artists can spend less time fiddling with Blender's UI and more time creating art?

unrelat3d• 3 months ago

Unrelated but what do you all get from this endless speculation about others motives?

To me it just comes across like the stereotype of a lonely house wife peaking through the blinds judging the neighbors.

This forum is just as absurd as Reddit but in a subtle way; politically correct language without the zany memes but nonetheless absurd sense of self righteousness and importance and the validity of endless unsubstantiated assertions and qualifications.

As if not posting about Harambe affords legitimacy while posting what boils down to intrusive thoughts about people and motives y'all are removed from.

The nostalgia fueled appeals to preserve your grasp of reality specifically are just a modern conservatism. Time moves on and has as little obligation to stand still for HN doomers as it does adherents of traditional religions, contemporary American capitalism .

The horse and buggy and rotary phone and other engineers screwed out of careers by off shoring playing a tiny violin for script kiddies who grew up to become expert Python and DevOps engineers.

Get over yourself. Your efforts are a drop in the ocean of human effort. Ffs this comes off as some fine whine.

hirako20004• 3 months ago

Blender didn't have support from big tech for decades and has flourished. It's now on par with top of the line proprietary 3d software.

The upside is meaningless compared to what's at risk when for-profit grows influence.

jonas212• 3 months ago

Google has been supporting Blender for over 20 years, initially through Summer of Code [1, 2], and also via corporate sponsorship once Blender started offering it.

And I'm pretty sure I've seen most of the other big names in tech on the sponsors page for many years now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code

[2] https://code.blender.org/2011/04/google-summer-of-code-2011-...

teeray• 3 months ago

Because Blender is a tool for making art and Anthropic makes tools for stealing art

ollin• 3 months ago

AFAIK Anthropic hasn't built any image or video generation tools yet, just text/code generation. OpenAI/Google/xAI all built image/video generation teams though so it may only be a matter of time.

atleastoptimal2• 3 months ago

Saying stuff like this about any AI company is silly and makes critics sound more like stochastic parrots than AI models themselves.

Anthropic hasn't even shipped an image or video model. What is "stealing art", the fact that AI models are trained on data? What constitutes stealing in that?

mrdependable• 3 months ago

Is this going to be another app that I have to make sure I opt-out of training for?

therobots927• 3 months ago

This will be a big step up from using python to generate shitty gifs

xinayder• 3 months ago

I hope this doesn't mean enshittification of Blender.

slopinthebag5• 3 months ago

Ugh. I love Blender, it's the greatest software of all time according to myself, and I absolutely hate this and I am terrified at what it implies. If they just want name recognition ok fine, but my guess is Anthropic will want changes to Blender itself and I find that totally unacceptable.

Ah well, the online artist community is unusually principled on matters like this, especially compared to here. If they start doing shady stuff it will get forked and probably spell the end of the Blender foundation, which would still be really bad of course.

Sigh. Not a happy Tuesday.

JeremyHerrman• 3 months ago

it would be funny if this was meant as a goodwill gesture from anthropic to counter all the recent bad press, only for it to cause even more drama

panzi7• 3 months ago

People seem not to be aware of this: https://fund.blender.org/funding-policy/

I agree that it's not a good look for Blender, but I don't think that something actually bad will come from this. (Other than maybe a negative impact to Blender's reputation.)

panzi7• 3 months ago

I didn't think about their involvement with the American military. That changes my view on this.

panzi7• 3 months ago

Wait, wasn't that OpenAI, not Anthropic? Lost track of all those AI companies.

DrNosferatu3• 3 months ago

It's only a matter of time before parametric approaches (think LaTex for CAD, ie: via a descriptor language) enable LLMs to start 3D modeling.

DrNosferatu3• 3 months ago

In fact, descriptor languages for everything...

nickthegreek2• 3 months ago

already works well enough for a few projects for me in OpenSCAD.

DrNosferatu3• 3 months ago

How far can your LLM go with OpenSCAD?

SuperNinKenDo• 3 months ago

I'm so sick of it. I'm so fucking sick of it.

babush• 3 months ago

Mixed feelings about creative work and AI, but if it wasn't for LLMs I would have chosen a different software than Blender for my hobby-level 2D animation. Made a Blender plugin w/ Claude, and it's saving me so much time (:

tayo422• 3 months ago

I was wondering the other day if Ai could do tedious things like retopology and figuring out effecient uv unwrapping

Also was wondering how'd it would do things like sculpting? That sounds expensive like either you send millions of polygons for the model to explore? And that ruins the context window order doesn't even fit, or your sending tons of screenshots?

ecshafer2• 3 months ago

Has anyone found a really good ai modeling and animation workflow? Ive tried a few like Meshy which work but I am not super happy with the results.

CSMastermind2• 3 months ago

No it's a big area of opportunity right now. All the existing solutions are pretty rough.

ecshafer2• 3 months ago

The latest chatgpt Image generation model is producing really nice results for turning sprites into sprite animations. Which is something a year ago felt impossible to get right. But 3d has been impossible for me to get anything good.

charlie90• 3 months ago

Not to be a shill, but Hunyuan 3d studio is pretty good. You get 20 free credits/day which is pretty generous.

Texturing still is subpar. But I've found that using Hunyuan for modeling+retopo+unwrap -> clean up in blender -> texture in substance painter is actually a pretty nice workflow for some stuff.

arjie• 3 months ago

I'm thrilled for the world where I can drive more things with an LLM. The big limiting factor for me for little home improvement things was that I'm not very good at modeling so I have to get my wife to go do things for me. That's fine, she's happy to do it, but sometimes you kind of just have to try yourself to see what you're really looking to do.

Recently I've been using Claude Code with `build123d`[0] and it's pretty good, but my wife uses Blender so it would be cool to come up with something at least halfway decent and then have her clean it up.

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-24/Modeling_Bet...

threepts• 3 months ago

Anthropic is BLEEDING through cash as we speak while valuations soar and they have the funds to do charity?

I feel this a thinly veiled attempt at again, stealing IP.

HDBaseT2• 3 months ago

Anthropic seemingly is one of the only profitable AI companies at the moment.

The AI "bubble" is hard to pop, at least for this big companies which will just receive bailout after bailout from the Government if shit hits the fan.

I don't see how Anthropic sponsoring Blender is an "attempt at again stealing IP"

dismalaf• 3 months ago

This makes sense. Blender has had (non-LLM) generative features for a long time, hooking LLMs into the Python API to generate art makes sense (it's probably already done but for it to be sponsored is nice).

lifeisstillgood• 3 months ago

I just wanted to note a couple of things

1. That looks great and I hope they can make blender even better, or pay people to do that. Raise your rates for corps Blender!

2. What does this have to do with any strategic position for Claude. Their goals are

“Enterprises pay us a fortune to either

1. Sift through unbelievable volumes of data to pick out fairly easy to find nuggets

2. Tell everyone their jobs are at risk to keep them in line”

There is no other play. AGI is science fiction.

So why are they launching this? Because they don’t have a strategic core running through - it’s always been “wow what else can this do”. That’s a research project at the price of billion dollar data centres.

Unless we do achieve AGI (which we won’t) the price tag is way beyond the returns we are seeing.

unixhero• 3 months ago

2. Donate to open source projects = be good

Kye3• 3 months ago

People surprised by Anthropic getting in on Blender funding obviously never saw any of the Blender/ChatGPT integrations a few years ago. This has been coming for a long time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhN7P7ENu4g

That was ancient times in LLM terms. I've seen demos that create whole scenes in a single prompt.

There are lots of non-coding use cases for LLMs that don't burn through compute but are still useful. Anthropic is starting to catch on, and it makes sense to focus there with the compute crunch.

h4kunamata• 3 months ago

The backlash is because everytime opensource projects gets involved with lots of money, everything goes to shit.

ch_fr• 3 months ago

Not to be a hater or anything (I'm a hater), but I'm seeing people mention the potential of LLMs for the "grunt work" like retopo, but I can't really begin to imagine what the "correct" data representation and python api calls would even begin to look like in a training set? Would an LLM really be querying vertices in relation to one another and estimate whether their distance "sounds" like good topology?

0dayz• 3 months ago

I hope this drives the move towards what I have kept on saying is "good use" of generative ai: being able to generate animations.

It's tedious work, not the most fun thing to do especially for units like random enemy #20.

Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

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