Blender reports Anthropic sponsorship after €240K payment draws AI takeover backlash

• Blender’s original announcement said Anthropic had joined the Development Fund as a Corporate Patron, while minchoi’s post linking the 80 Level report highlighted the reported €240,000 annual amount and the backlash that followed.
• By May 1, Blender had reversed the structure: in Blender’s policy update, Francesco Siddi said the money would be received as a singular donation instead of a Development Fund membership, a shift that bilawalsidhu’s follow-up said effectively pulled the public patronage.
• The tool integration did not disappear. Anthropic’s creative-work announcement still says the Blender MCP connector is officially available, and bilawalsidhu’s post said “the connector still ships.”
• Blender’s own language is narrower than the Twitter framing. In the Blender Lab MCP page, the project is described as an external MCP server that gives LLMs a natural-language interface to Blender’s Python API, not built-in generative AI inside Blender itself.

You can read Blender’s original sponsor announcement, then jump to the May 1 reversal. Anthropic’s own creative-work post was updated the same day to note that Blender chose a one-time donation instead of Fund membership. The useful technical detail sits in Blender Lab’s MCP docs, which spell out that the connector runs through external tools and manual setup.

Blender’s April 28 post made the relationship sound straightforward: Anthropic was joining the Development Fund as a Corporate Patron, and the money would support core work around Blender’s Python API.

That public framing triggered the fight. The linked 80 Level report quoted Francesco Siddi, Blender’s CEO, saying the support would help Blender keep pursuing projects independently, while also documenting creator backlash over taking money from a generative AI company.

Three days later, Blender changed the arrangement. In the official update, Siddi wrote that Blender would receive the funds as “a singular donation instead of a Development Fund membership,” and said Anthropic supported the decision.

Bilawal Sidhu’s summary matched the official text on the practical outcome: the funding stayed, but the visible Fund membership did not. Anthropic also amended its own announcement with a May 1 note saying Blender had elected to receive the contribution as a one-time donation.

The product side of the partnership survived the backlash. In Anthropic’s connector announcement, the company says Blender developers built an MCP connector that lets Claude analyze scenes, write batch-edit scripts, and add tools through Blender’s Python API.

Blender’s own MCP Server page is more specific about the setup: Blender has no built-in LLM connection, and users need Blender 5.1 or newer plus an add-on, an LLM client, and the MCP server running separately.

The sharpest new line came in Blender’s May 1 policy post. Siddi wrote that Blender is “made by humans for humans” and that “no generative AI functionality is currently available or planned to be integrated in Blender.”

That leaves a narrow lane for the Anthropic-linked work that remains. Blender Lab’s Q1 activity report says the project keeps a “firm artist-centric policy” on AI while exploring an MCP connector, and the MCP project page emphasizes open interoperability, noting that the server can work with other LLM clients too.