4Don't Worry About the Vase (Zvi Mowshowitz)·
Zvi Mowshowitz introduces Lightcone Commons, a large-scale philanthropy coordination platform
Oliver Habryka is launching Lightcone Commons, a new funding platform designed to coordinate large-scale ambitious philanthropy. The announcement is covered by Zvi Mowshowitz on his Substack. The platform appears to be connected to Lightcone Infrastructure, which operates LessWrong and the EA Forum, suggesting relevance to the AI safety and rationalist funding ecosystem.
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Anthropic Launches Claude for Nonprofits with 75% Discount and Sector-Specific Integrations
Anthropic is launching Claude for Nonprofits in partnership with GivingTuesday, offering eligible organizations up to 75% discounts on Team and Enterprise plans. The program includes new open-source connectors to nonprofit-specific platforms (Blackbaud, Candid, Benevity), a free AI Fluency for Nonprofits course via Anthropic Academy, and consulting partnerships with organizations like The Bridgespan Group and Slalom. Existing deployments cited include the Epilepsy Foundation's 24/7 support tool reaching 3.4 million Americans, IRC humanitarian field operations, and IDinsight reporting 16× faster survey preparation.
Anthropic Donates Model Context Protocol to Linux Foundation, Co-founds Agentic AI Foundation
Anthropic is donating the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the newly established Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund under the Linux Foundation co-founded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, with support from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg. MCP has reached significant adoption milestones including 10,000+ active public servers, 97M+ monthly SDK downloads, and integration into ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Visual Studio Code. The AAIF will also house Block's goose and OpenAI's AGENTS.md as founding projects, aiming to foster open, vendor-neutral standards for agentic AI. MCP governance will remain community-driven with existing maintainers continuing their roles.
Anthropic and Menlo Ventures launch $100M Anthology Fund for AI startups
Anthropic has partnered with Menlo Ventures to launch the Anthology Fund, a $100 million initiative financed by Menlo to support startups building on Anthropic technology. Target investment areas include AI infrastructure, healthcare, education, scientific research, consumer AI, and trust and safety tooling. Backed startups receive access to Anthropic products, $25,000 in model credits, and venture support from Menlo. The fund represents Anthropic's effort to expand its ecosystem and accelerate adoption of Claude-based applications.
Anthropic Launches The Anthropic Institute for AI Societal Impact Research
Anthropic is establishing The Anthropic Institute, a new interdisciplinary research body led by co-founder Jack Clark in his new role as Head of Public Benefit. The Institute consolidates and expands three existing Anthropic teams—Frontier Red Team, Societal Impacts, and Economic Research—to study AI's effects on economies, jobs, governance, and legal systems. Notable founding hires include Matt Botvinick (AI and rule of law), Anton Korinek (transformative AI economics), and Zoë Hitzig (AI social/economic impacts). Anthropic is simultaneously expanding its Public Policy organization and opening a Washington DC office.
Anthropic forms $200 million partnership with the Gates Foundation
Anthropic and the Gates Foundation are committing $200 million over four years in grant funding, Claude usage credits, and technical support across global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility. Key technical deliverables include healthcare AI benchmarks and evaluation frameworks, disease modeling integrations with the Institute for Disease Modeling, drug/vaccine screening tools for neglected diseases, and agricultural AI datasets. The partnership is led by Anthropic's Beneficial Deployments team and includes public goods such as open datasets and benchmarks. This represents a significant scaling of Anthropic's non-commercial AI deployment strategy.
Anthropic launches Claude Corps: $150M fellowship program placing AI-trained workers at nonprofits
Anthropic is launching Claude Corps, a national fellowship program committing $150M to train 1,000 early-career fellows in Claude usage and place them full-time at nonprofits across the US for 12-month stints at $85,000 salaries. The program is structured as a three-way partnership between Anthropic (funding and Claude expertise), CodePath (employer of record and training), and Social Finance (measurement and scaling vehicle). Anthropic frames the initiative as a direct response to AI-driven labor disruption, aiming to both equip nonprofits with AI capabilities and build AI skills in workers absorbing economic change. The $150M initial commitment is positioned as a foundation for a larger, scalable model.
Interconnects #22: Zyphra, Cohere, and Poolside expand open model ecosystem
Interconnects newsletter issue #22 surveys recent open model releases and ecosystem moves from Zyphra, Cohere, and Poolside, assessing the motivations behind each company's decision to release models openly. The piece frames these releases as broadening the breadth of the open-weights ecosystem beyond the dominant players. As a tier-2 commentary piece, it provides useful practitioner-level signal on which second-tier labs are investing in open releases and why.
Update on the OpenAI Foundation
The OpenAI Foundation has announced plans to invest at least $1 billion across four focus areas: curing diseases, economic opportunity, AI resilience, and community programs. This represents a significant philanthropic commitment from OpenAI's nonprofit arm. The announcement signals OpenAI's intent to direct substantial resources toward societal benefit and AI resilience initiatives.