14 comments

  • cmiles8 47 minutes ago
    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.
    • enugu 29 minutes ago
      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.
      • colechristensen 28 minutes ago
        And a sizable tax deduction.
        • chadash 3 minutes ago
          IANAA, but pretty sure you can only deduct a donation against business profit. Are you suggesting that Anthropic is running at a profit?
        • yreg 19 minutes ago
          Who profits from that deduction and how?
          • nozzlegear 9 minutes ago
            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.
          • mikepurvis 9 minutes 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.
            • trollbridge 5 minutes 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.
    • romaniv 38 minutes ago
      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/

    • giancarlostoro 34 minutes ago
      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.
    • georgemcbay 29 minutes ago
      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.

  • flossly 3 minutes ago
    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).

  • slackfan 12 minutes ago
    Welp, time to make sure your triple F reserves are stocked up.
  • barbarr 55 minutes ago
    So... Does the Gates foundation get an equity stake?
    • scyzoryk_xyz 1 minute ago
      An equity stake? Psh time for the Gates Foundation to become a normal for-profit AI company!
  • podgietaru 40 minutes ago
    Bill Gates, famous climate activist? Mmm.
    • ZeroGravitas 30 minutes ago
      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.
      • shimman 24 minutes ago
        Let's also not forget his wife divorcing him over his Epstein partying.
    • dev_l1x_be 36 minutes ago
      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.
      • giancarlostoro 32 minutes ago
        > 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?

        • cma 5 minutes ago
          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.
    • kennywinker 23 minutes ago
      Don’t forget: friend of notorious pedophile jeffery epstein.
      • AndrewKemendo 22 minutes ago
        Not just friend

        He actively abused trafficked women including non-consensually exposing his wife to an STI

        These are the worst people on the planet and should be dissected while living and live-streamed as an example to others

        • brabel 6 minutes ago
          > should be dissected while living

          You sound like an exemplar citizen yourself /s

          • AndrewKemendo 5 minutes ago
            How are people out here defending these people like you have to have a totally depraved worldview to even think that these people should live in the same world as us

            Do you have a better suggestion for eliminating the Epstein class?

        • ai_slop_hater 13 minutes ago
          [flagged]
          • AndrewKemendo 11 minutes ago
            This is one of the most insane things I’ve read recently so kudos to being totally depraved

            If you feel like that then you should take some deep introspection

            Some of us actually live by our values for example not raping trafficked prostitutes and then giving infections to our wives and then lying to them about it

            If that describes you then yeah I think you should probably go ahead and take yourself out of the pool

            • nozzlegear 3 minutes ago
              > Some of us actually live by our values for example not raping trafficked prostitutes and then giving infections to our wives and then lying to them about it

              And advocating for the streamed, live dissection of the accused, apparently.

              > This is one of the most insane things I’ve read recently so kudos to being totally depraved

  • shevy-java 22 minutes ago
    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.

  • hiroto_lemon 18 minutes ago
    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.

  • throwaway613746 27 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • lorecore 53 minutes ago
    [flagged]
    • Fokamul 49 minutes ago
      Because it's the same people.
  • Fokamul 50 minutes ago
    Pedos Foundation
  • kennywinker 20 minutes ago
    The gates foundation: money laundering and influence purchasing for billionaires who occasionally want to slip their wives antibiotics.
  • sowbug 26 minutes ago
    Is that $200M with the prompt cache at five minutes, or one hour?
  • amelius 41 minutes ago
    Gates missed the boat with the internet. This is not going to happen a second time!
    • icedchai 27 minutes ago
      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.
      • chrisrickard 22 minutes ago
        … i’m still seeing a therapist about this time period.