I wonder, if Ton was involved in that decision, or if it's only Francesco. Could turn out to be a very unlucky start into the leadership role.
And the worries about "blender just being sold to xyz..." have been around forever. Always wrong. People with AMD cards were screaming when Nvidia became sponsor, and other way round.
It is more about the signal sent, in this case.
For everyone who is interested, here is the mastodon thread: https://mastodon.social/@Blender/116482997785333001 (it is just like to be expected though)
I feel this a thinly veiled attempt at again, stealing IP.
The AI "bubble" is hard to pop, at least for this big companies which will just receive bailout after bailout from the Government if shit hits the fan.
I don't see how Anthropic sponsoring Blender is an "attempt at again stealing IP"
If Blender doesn't grow AI capabilities, its utility in the future will be severely degraded.
If you haven't seen 3D mesh, texturing, PBR, and retopo tools, they're getting extremely good.
AI is a nebulous term. AI denoisers are not the same thing as an LLM or image gen model, the ire is directed at LLMs and not AI denoisers because they are completely different things.
Ah well, the online artist community is unusually principled on matters like this, especially compared to here. If they start doing shady stuff it will get forked and probably spell the end of the Blender foundation, which would still be really bad of course.
Sigh. Not a happy Tuesday.
There already are LLM plugins for Blenders and prompt integration for model generation, rigging and co.
If the idea is to support Blender for use with “Digital Twins” or “World Models” then the first step is to start with accurate geometry. Anything less is slop.
So they want claude to be able to talk to blender
I've used Claude to write some blender scripts and it's an excellent use case. I look forward to even better claude/blender interaction based on this annonuncement.
Not sure if this one was the one I saw, but Google gave me this one. You could use Claude Code to build things with Blender.
"Some software" is approaching levels of complexity where, perhaps, it gets to a point where a human is barely able to even use it.
At the same time (brave new world) LLM assisted software opens up the possibility of levels of complexity we would not have considered before.
I'm reminded of Sam Altman's performative helplessness on Jimmy Kimmel, when he described being unable believe a baby without ChatGPT. That's something I believe humanity has been capable of doing for a good portion of its existence, and not something we should give up to the hands of a yet-unproven, yet-unprofitable technology.
Art should demand more of the creator than the person experiencing it.
The alternative is 9 billion who cares slop things.
MuBlE: MuJoCo and Blender simulation Environment and Benchmark for Task Planning in Robot Manipulation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02834
As an amateur this is really exciting - but not sure about folks that are real pros at this stuff.
Would be rad to incorporate some statistical procedurally generated designs based on my own aparatus.
What I do not want to see is this realm of LLMs hijacking decades of hard work and consideration for integration channels to more tailor towards their LLMs, not for the diligent engineer.
If they want to put their tentacles as far as they want while making products more difficult to work with innovation of a different color, they are making enemies out of, at least me.
AI _can_ work with 3D models already, but it's really bad at it. CAD requires an extra level of control and I think this is where I could see AI companies wanting to get a foot in the door.
e.g "Let's build an adapter between 2in BSP Male and 3/4in NPT Female threads with a third Hose Barb outlet with the following properties..."
This just means more support for a major OSS project.
1. That looks great and I hope they can make blender even better, or pay people to do that. Raise your rates for corps Blender!
2. What does this have to do with any strategic position for Claude. Their goals are
“Enterprises pay us a fortune to either
1. Sift through unbelievable volumes of data to pick out fairly easy to find nuggets
2. Tell everyone their jobs are at risk to keep them in line”
There is no other play. AGI is science fiction.
So why are they launching this? Because they don’t have a strategic core running through - it’s always been “wow what else can this do”. That’s a research project at the price of billion dollar data centres.
Unless we do achieve AGI (which we won’t) the price tag is way beyond the returns we are seeing.
Having more native integration into Blender, which I'm already much more familiar with, will be fantastic.
The biggest challenge at this point is figuring out how to make the dice print consistently. With each die face only having a few points of contact, they keep unsticking. What I'm trying now is cutting the dice in half, printing the halves, and then sticking them together with dowels.
[0] https://www.printables.com/model/821177-octobabble-a-word-ba...
This is unsurprising as a general development other than Anthropic doesn’t have a 3D model generation framework.
I don’t think this is to create MCP servers necessarily but rather to improve the blender pipeline further.
I agree that it's not a good look for Blender, but I don't think that something actually bad will come from this. (Other than maybe a negative impact to Blender's reputation.)
Recently I've been using Claude Code with `build123d`[0] and it's pretty good, but my wife uses Blender so it would be cool to come up with something at least halfway decent and then have her clean it up.
0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-24/Modeling_Bet...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhN7P7ENu4g
That was ancient times in LLM terms. I've seen demos that create whole scenes in a single prompt.
There are lots of non-coding use cases for LLMs that don't burn through compute but are still useful. Anthropic is starting to catch on, and it makes sense to focus there with the compute crunch.
It's tedious work, not the most fun thing to do especially for units like random enemy #20.
I'd prefer Blender get some additional funding out of this AI bubble at least.
Money is good. But not antagonizing your community (as an open source project) is better.
Some of them, like the illustrious MrDoob (behind Threejs), love AI and are all-in on it.
The VFX folks at Corridor Crew [1] have been leaning into AI for years now and showing a healthy attitude and path forward to using AI in workflows.
Texturing still is subpar. But I've found that using Hunyuan for modeling+retopo+unwrap -> clean up in blender -> texture in substance painter is actually a pretty nice workflow for some stuff.
Also was wondering how'd it would do things like sculpting? That sounds expensive like either you send millions of polygons for the model to explore? And that ruins the context window order doesn't even fit, or your sending tons of screenshots?
And Blender tries to get funding from many different donors so that no single one can have any sway over them. Anthropic, as disgusting as they are, are just one more donor. Epic, Nvidia, Google, CoreWeave are also patrons. I don't worry about that donation.
You know, for now...
The press release calls out the Blender Python API, specifically, which makes sense for agentic use.
Pretty much spells it out. They have an interest in extending/supporting the ability for Claude/CC to use and interact with Blender. There may be gaps in endpoints that Anthropic needs to enable certain patterns of automated usage.
> This support will be dedicated towards Blender core development, to maintain and continuously improve foundational features like the Blender Python API, which enables developers and artists alike to extend and improve the software for custom workflows.
Chances are they were expecting the agent to spoon-feed hundreds of influencers.
“We love art :P”
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/spreadshee...
Blender already has ton of other Corporate Patron level sponsors, such as Netflix, Meta, Intel, BMW, Adobe and others.
I understand that creating an LLM itself is transformative, but an LLM trained on copyrighted works remains capable of generating derivative works, which eventually will result in successful copyright lawsuits against LLM users who redistribute those derivative works.
In advance of that day, the great race is to build a licensed corpus as aggressively as possible (see Github's latest decision to opt in Copilot usage). Even if Blender doesn't send your data on every save, various options can be developed, such as publishing to a Blender-controlled public channel.
Anthropic hasn't even shipped an image or video model. What is "stealing art", the fact that AI models are trained on data? What constitutes stealing in that?
I doubt Anthropic has much use for such a tool internally. They're sponsoring it because they want to inject their slop into it and replace the people who do use it.
> Blender Foundation’s mission remains to empower artists with free/open source technology and tools. Yet, we also maintain APIs for individuals and corporations to extend Blender, also beyond what’s aligned with Blender’s mission. We consider this part of the Software Freedom that’s embodied with Blender’s GNU GPL license.
Oh, noes, the horrors of democratising access to an expert tool. What will onshape do now, that the free one is accessible to oom more regular people that could use a 3d shape but don't have the time to learn a very complicated yet powerful tool?
I guess people have said the same about game engines / coding tools that help artists turn their vision into working, compiling games, right? Riiight?
To me it just comes across like the stereotype of a lonely house wife peaking through the blinds judging the neighbors.
This forum is just as absurd as Reddit but in a subtle way; politically correct language without the zany memes but nonetheless absurd sense of self righteousness and importance and the validity of endless unsubstantiated assertions and qualifications.
As if not posting about Harambe affords legitimacy while posting what boils down to intrusive thoughts about people and motives y'all are removed from.
The nostalgia fueled appeals to preserve your grasp of reality specifically are just a modern conservatism. Time moves on and has as little obligation to stand still for HN doomers as it does adherents of traditional religions, contemporary American capitalism .
The horse and buggy and rotary phone and other engineers screwed out of careers by off shoring playing a tiny violin for script kiddies who grew up to become expert Python and DevOps engineers.
Get over yourself. Your efforts are a drop in the ocean of human effort. Ffs this comes off as some fine whine.
The upside is meaningless compared to what's at risk when for-profit grows influence.
And I'm pretty sure I've seen most of the other big names in tech on the sponsors page for many years now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code
[2] https://code.blender.org/2011/04/google-summer-of-code-2011-...
Relatedly, IMO "trust" as a word / concept is deserving of being reevaluated nowadays.
E.g. I don't know that you, NitpickLawyer, are a real person. And when I go through the mental exercise of inventing the details, proofs, and evidence I'd need in order to satisfy my doubt, I never succeed until I reach the physical-contact-with-NitpickLawyer condition.
So I think we need to evaluate what is necessary for oneself to operate in society, separate from these untrustable things .. such as media / news reports, and all the other things I just don't want to worry about, right now. :-(
If you like listening to AI generated content, then that’s fine! I’m glad you found something you enjoy.
For me, I consume art because I want to understand other people. For example, when I go to an art museum I want to emotionally connect with the artist: to feel what they were feeling, or understand an idea they’re conveying. I have little desire to emotionally connect with stochastic token sampling. It seems a vapid way to spend time
Storytelling didn’t go away when the theatre was invented. Theatre didn’t go away when cinema arrived. Cinema wasn’t replaced when radio arrived, ad that wasn’t completely replace by TV, etc. It is a mix of things these days and it will probably remain that way.
- https://donnybenet.bandcamp.com/album/il-basso
Totally not written by Google.
If not, doesn't your argument entirely miss the point?
This is a really interesting example. Why do you foresee artistic direction going away as a result of AI? More importantly: why didn't we lose that with the transitions through the years of special effects - i.e., from practical to 3D-rendered?
Example: https://makerworld.com/en/models/2456180-token-creator
That being said, it's about the same for the code it produces for non purely creative things, but for artistic work, I doubt an LLM in between gives any gain. After all, we do have an interface. A human interface.
I suspect your connection to real artists won't be impacted. This, like the music example, just highlights our assumptions.
I'm not defending this AI garbage fwiw, i just don't think it's as interesting as most people make it out to be. I adore music, and i connect with songs i connect with. I don't typically think about the possible ghost writers, teams of writers, ghost players, etc. The music either speaks to me or it doesn't.
Though i'm not trying to connect to the musician as a person. However, as i was illustrating - if i really wanted to connect to musicians at face value, that ship sailed many, many years ago. Far before AI.
There are ways to mitigate this, but that balance will always be there - it was before AI, and it will be after. It's an evolution. Not an enjoyable one perhaps, but it is nonetheless.
Exactly right. Everyone online is all to happy to proclaim what hill other people should die on, but is rarely willing to go up there themselves.
it seems pretty active, albeit small donations at a time.
I know what I want, no idea how to tool my way there.
I spend two months going through YT tutorials, mucking about in Blender in order to figure out how to put together the model I have in my head [1].
(A year later, a new project idea—and it's back to YouTube because the learning is not only a steep curve but also sometimes so esoteric that it's fleeting.)
While it’s just a “you” problem. Some folks have better skills, knowledge and comfort with difficult subjects. And that’s fine.
Further, I'm suggesting "designed by people to be understood and used by people" might be a hurdle for some future software we might envision.
(Altman's performance is orthogonal as I'm suggesting a new level of software that has not yet been written/conceived.)
(I'm sorry if my tangent about Altman was taken as a personal affront, as I did not mean it to be that. It just muddied the two interesting topics you brought up.)
it felt weak at it , like the corpus wasn't strong with blender/python work to look through , but it got going at it fairly fast with some coaxing.
We'll see how it shakes out. As a non-proficient Blender user, I'm kinda keen on this since I have had a lot of ideas that I haven't been able to realize in Blender.
The tech is here. We can fight it, or adapt and embrace it.
If previous examples from the industrial revolution are anything to go by, fighting automation is a losing battle.
And your conspiracy theory about the Blender developers selling out to Anthropic and secretly checking in code (that anyone can see since it's public) that sends data to Anthropic is objectively idiotic.
Unity donated a lot of money to Blender too. Do you have any evidence that Blender sends data to Unity?
Can you point to the code in Blender that sends data to Unity? Or is your conspiracy theory that the official Blender builds contain secret spy code that is not checked into the repo? How many Blender developers are in on this conspiracy, and how have they kept it secret until now, now that you publicly announced your accusations that they intentionally spy on their users in exchange for donations from sponsors?
Art is very varied, its not just paintings or photographs. Video games can be art, music can be art (artists!), an eloquent dance can be art.
However I wouldn't call AI training on text in books "stealing art"
The only losers here are old or bitter people who have tied up their worldview into their own time and cannot see or comprehend that the world has moved on with a different bound for the experiences and expectations.
Obviously I can't speak for all of Gen Z (and I realize we're no longer "the younger generation"), but my friends and I don't want any part of this, and feel optimistic rather than bitter that things won't go the way you're describing. I seldom meet anyone in my age group that isn't talking about moving away from social media, cancelling software subscriptions, all of the things that millenials and Gen X seem to be so excited to continue building and promoting.
Even at my workplace the "older" people are the ones that are excited about stuff like AI jazz remixes of rap songs and AI generated short films, while literally everyone else under 30 finds it pretty cringe and makes fun of them in DMs.
So all that to say, I disagree with your outlook, but I guess time will tell.
When the social culture is based around platforms and content that has subscriptions, and when media and what you see is consolidated, you can't just exit without losing a big part of the social context because the people around you are eating the same thing.
I dislike slop as much as anyone else. I think it puts a higher burden on the receiver of information to filter the signal in a pile of trash. I just don't really see an actual way out if you look at it from a societal level with the existing structures and incentives.
It's not reasonable to require that those people be mentally organized in a manner that already mistrusts reality, in a healthy manner.
edit: I seem to be rate limited and unable to reply? I'll paste it here:
I'm sorry but I don't agree. People care about art when it is extraordinary, in the same way people watch professional sport because it is extraordinary, or they watch cooking shows because it's extraordinary. What you call "democratisation" I would call the trivialisation of something which used to take effort into something which does not. People don't watch random people who have never played soccer before at the World Cup, they don't watch someone who can barely cook Kraft dinner cook on MasterChef, and they don't go to museums to look at someone's first sketch. There is no reason to assume that the trivialisation of art wouldn't simply devalue the medium to the point of irrelevance. However since people seek what is extraordinary, you will always have gates which are kept, and for good reason.
edit 2, responding to hbosch:
You don't have to be an extraordinary soccer player to enjoy playing soccer, but that doesn't mean we should develop a pill that makes everyone a great soccer player with no skill development or effort required. We don't watch professional sports just to see a ball move fast, we watch to see what a human is capable of through discipline and hard work. If everyone could take a pill to become an elite athlete, the sport wouldn't be democratized, it would be deleted.
When you remove the effort barrier you don't make art easier, you collapse the meaning of striving for excellence. If the 'expert' and the 'novice' produce the same result with the same button press, we haven't empowered the novice, we’ve just made the expertise irrelevant.
Tools like Blender are force multipliers for human intent, generative AI is a replacement for it. If you use Blender to make a "stupid little game," you’ve gained a skill. If you use AI to generate the assets for that game, you haven't gained a skill, you’ve simply acted as a manager for an automated system. The value of that game to the creator isn't just the code, it’s the fact that they built it. I find it really hard to believe that people find value besides the initial novelty in having a computer generate stupid little games - for what purpose? If nobody is going to play it, and you haven't built it, precisely where does the value in it come from? It's like a simulacrum of human creation.
What I actually see is people who are unwilling to put in the effort but seek the rewards anyways. They want the accolades from creation but without the hard work. I dont see the value in enabling this.
Do you believe it's a good thing that all software is becoming noticeably lower quality? Do you believe it's a good thing that open source is on its death bed now that licenses don't mean anything and popular projects are drowning under AI generated PR spam? Even here on HN, Show HN is effectively dead as almost every single submission is some boring garbage generated in 30 minutes that nobody cares about, not even the person who submitted it.
Experts don't need to have a moat built around them, because they build their own moats with their skills and efforts. Just because you get jealous and feel entitled to the fruits of the experts' labor while being unwilling to put in the same work does not mean you have the right to steal their work and mix it up in a computer algorithm so you can later claim it as yours.
The upside? A new generation of content creator who may profit from automation.
We never had problems creating art. In fact, what's artistic is relative to the effort involved in the creation process; also, access to technology available at the time.
To me the argument is valid. It's devaluing the skills of existing artists, and the decade long investment they likely put into their craft.
The truth is, the vast majority of art is not extraordinary, whether it comes from a canvas, a typewriter, Photoshop, or Blender. That is as true for AI as it is for humans. Likewise, the vast majority of people who kick a soccer ball will never be extraordinary soccer players.
I firmly believe that tools which enable people to get closer to their goals are always a good thing. The concept of what makes something "extraordinary" does not come from the maker, or the tool, but from the beholder. It is the audience's job to discern what is and isn't "extraordinary", not the makers'.
Honestly these people are just so weird.
What are you talking about? We should absolutely do this. We should extend this to as many domains of human achievement as possible. By this logic, computers shouldn't have existed because it devalued the skill that scribes and accountants developed before word processors and spreadsheets. Blender itself is a tool that made 3D accessible to thousands of people who previously had to pay for expensive licenses, training, and SGI workstations. Literally the whole point of technology is to make more things possible for people unable to do it naturally or without great effort.
But, there is plenty of open source stuff out there to enable people to have their own models, running on their own hardware. Business does not need to go to the big 3.
The slop isn't coming, it arrived decades ago. The Pandora's box of slop is already open. Maybe AI widens the aperture, but if you cannot handle the discernment required to separate slop from something useful or meaningful, that is your problem.
That's exactly it. The goal is lose a big part of the social context. It driven by rage bait, AI bots, state actors, and a thousand other influences that are predominantly negative. Of course amazing things happen online. However, the good is not worth bad. I'm raising my kids and they will never have a smart phone. Will they miss out on somethings? Of course! They also won't have their attention span destroyed, their ability to be bored and creative in the real world destroyed, they won't have body issues, they won't be caught up in the alt-right pipeline, they won't have their brains fried by content like Mr. Beast which is designed to be as hyper and addicting as possible. Missing out on the current social context is the entire goal. People were happier before it.
I think this is only possible if you find a community with similar values, like religious, or hippie, where the focus is put on other things. Otherwise you might deprive your kids of what you want to give them because they will not feel socially connected.