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#foundation#gates#anthropic#more#sure#deals#epstein#here#bill#claude

Discussion (63 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

keedaabout 1 hour ago
Missed opportunity to call this a "Phil-Anthropic" partnership. The word doesn't appear once in TFA. Highly disappointed.

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 spending their money faster than it grows.

karussell41 minutes ago
Bill-Anthropic ;)
cmiles8about 2 hours 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.
enuguabout 2 hours 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.
colechristensenabout 2 hours ago
And a sizable tax deduction.
chadashabout 2 hours ago
IANAA, but pretty sure you can only deduct a donation against business profit. Are you suggesting that Anthropic is running at a profit?
yregabout 2 hours ago
Who profits from that deduction and how?
romanivabout 2 hours 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/

davnicwil31 minutes ago
I think a tell that many of these deals likely aren't real and are basically just PR is the numbers are super round and digestable.

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.

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.

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.

hnthrow0287345about 1 hour ago
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.

Crazy how they can just lie to this extent without consequences. Or still get paid millions for making bad deals, meaning incompetence

willchisabout 1 hour ago
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.
giancarlostoroabout 2 hours 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.
georgemcbayabout 2 hours 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.

rsync6 minutes ago
Let me guess ...

Gates Foundation and/or principal actors attached to the Gates Foundation have equity stakes in Anthropic ...

... and they have made a decision to direct charitable funds toward the committed purchase of Anthropic tokens.

Do I have that right ?

Very much like Huang charitable foundation committing to purchase Coreweave services[1] ... which Huang has equity stakes in ?

[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/nvidia-ceos-foun...

podgietaruabout 2 hours ago
Bill Gates, famous climate activist? Mmm.
ZeroGravitasabout 2 hours 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.
shimmanabout 2 hours ago
Let's also not forget his wife divorcing him over his Epstein partying.
DANmode15 minutes ago
I specifically came here hoping to find authoritative discussion on whether or not this could be a net-good in any way,

despite him controlling the Foundation.

kennywinkerabout 2 hours ago
Don’t forget: friend of notorious pedophile jeffery epstein.
AndrewKemendoabout 2 hours 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

brabelabout 2 hours ago
> should be dissected while living

You sound like an exemplar citizen yourself /s

dev_l1x_beabout 2 hours 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.
giancarlostoroabout 2 hours 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?

mrhottakes3 minutes ago
Hoarding resources
cmaabout 2 hours 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.
sowbugabout 2 hours ago
Is that $200M with the prompt cache at five minutes, or one hour?
CodeWriter2340 minutes ago
Claude is officially dead to me now.
barbarrabout 2 hours ago
So... Does the Gates foundation get an equity stake?
scyzoryk_xyzabout 2 hours ago
An equity stake? Psh time for the Gates Foundation to become a normal for-profit AI company!
DANmode12 minutes ago
“It’s for National Security.”
flosslyabout 2 hours 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).

kennywinkerabout 2 hours ago
The gates foundation: money laundering and influence purchasing for billionaires who occasionally want to slip their wives antibiotics.
mrcwinnabout 1 hour ago
This is almost certainly gross. Don’t be evil, Anthropic.
lioeters12 minutes ago
MisAnthropic partnering with Epstein Foundation.
kev009about 1 hour ago
I'm a fan of Anthropic's product but this is incredibly tone deaf and makes me reconsider the judgement of their leadership.
kridsdale1about 1 hour ago
Why?
tombertabout 1 hour ago
Not the OP, but I suspect it's because of Bill Gates' recent scandals involving Jeffrey Epstein. Specifically with Bill Gates spiking his wife's food with antibiotics to cover up the fact that he got an STD from a Russian prostitute.
dyauspitr35 minutes ago
I’d much rather have someone spike my food with antibiotics than anything else.
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slackfanabout 2 hours ago
Welp, time to make sure your triple F reserves are stocked up.
shevy-javaabout 2 hours 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.

Fokamulabout 2 hours ago
Pedos Foundation
lorecoreabout 2 hours ago
Gross. Why work with an Epstein op?

Edit: to those downvoting, even Melinda Gates left the Gates Foundation over Epstein. Not sure why my statement is even remotely controversial.

honeycrispy11 minutes ago
Because like Gates, this site is notoriously left-wing.
mrhottakes1 minute ago
Yes, one of those numerous notoriously left-wing billionaires, that definitely exist.
lorecore7 minutes ago
As a leftist, I’ve never once considered Bill Gates or Anthropic to be even remotely left-wing. I’m not sure how it would be possible to frame them like that.
Fokamulabout 2 hours ago
Because it's the same people.
throwaway5752about 1 hour ago
The Gates Foundation has done measurably terrible work harming public education in the US.

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.

hiroto_lemonabout 2 hours 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.

ameliusabout 2 hours ago
Gates missed the boat with the internet. This is not going to happen a second time!
icedchaiabout 2 hours 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.
chrisrickardabout 2 hours ago
… i’m still seeing a therapist about this time period.
josefx30 minutes ago
> but did have the dominant browser for most of the 2000's.

By offering it for "free" as part of the OS. Which they could only do because they never intended to pay the developers who wrote it.

In a classic Microsoft move they fucked over their competition, their partners and the entire ecosystem for well over a decade.

hmokiguess16 minutes ago
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?