Topline
Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude that has also been at odds with the Trump administration, announced a $200 million partnership with billionaire Bill Gates’ Gates Foundation to develop AI tools for use in health, education, and agriculture.
Anthropic and the Gates Foundation signed a $200 million partnership. (Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
NurPhoto via Getty Images Key Facts
The Gates Foundation announced the $200 million deal in a release Thursday, saying the partnership aims to increase equity in AI development, targeting “health workers, teachers, policy makers, and farmers in low- and middle-income countries and underserved communities.”
The partnership will commit the funds over a period of four years, the announcement says, with development focusing on three areas: health, education and agriculture.
The health investment will aim to develop AI technology to assist in developing vaccines and other innovations, including the use of Claude to develop therapies for diseases including polio, HPV and preeclampsia.
For education, the partnership will work on AI models to improve student performance in the United States, sub-Saharan Africa and India, including AI-powered apps to support literacy and other AI-powered tools for curriculum design and college advising.
Anthropic and the Gates Foundation said the partnership will include agriculture-specific improvements to Claude that will provide farmers more “personalized, timely guidance on planting decisions.”
Grant funding and program design from the Gates Foundation will comprise half of the financial commitment, while the other half comes from Anthropic’s technical staff and usage credits for Claude, Reuters reported, citing unnamed officials.
Key Background
The Anthropic-Gates Foundation deal comes four months after Anthropic’s AI rival OpenAI struck a deal with the Gates Foundation worth $50 million and announced a partnership called Horizon 1000, through which the companies pledged “funding, technology, and technical support” for 1,000 healthcare clinics in African countries by 2028. The Gates-founded Microsoft and OpenAI had long been partners, though they announced a revamped partnership in April that said OpenAI’s revenue share payments to Microsoft will be “subject to a total cap.”
Tangent
Anthropic in recent months has sparred with the Trump administration. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said in a February blog post he opposes the Defense Department’s use of Anthropic technology for mass domestic surveillance and to power fully autonomous weapons. Trump, in a Truth Social post the next day, slammed Anthropic as a “radical left, woke company” and ordered federal agencies to stop using its technology. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he would designate Anthropic as a “supply chain risk to national security,” which Anthropic called “unprecedented,” filing a lawsuit against the Pentagon in March. OpenAI struck a deal with the Pentagon amid the Anthropic drama, saying its agreement with the Defense Department has “more guardrails” than Anthropic’s, which included provisions prohibiting the use of its technology for mass domestic surveillance and to power autonomous weapons. Earlier this month, the Defense Department’s CTO Emil Michael said Anthropic is still considered a national security risk, but its advanced Mythos technology is “a separate national security moment where we have to make sure that our networks are hardened up.” In late April, Politico reported the administration is trying to forge a “ceasefire” with Anthropic, citing six unnamed tech lobbyists and policy experts, two of whom have ties to the White House.