Anthropic invests $1.5 million in the Python Software Foundation and open source security
64 points by pauloxnet
64 points by pauloxnet
Given how important Python is to all these companies, they should be investing a lot more.
This is really tricky! On one hand, I fully agree with you. On the other hand, you could also take the view that any organization which has one donor that is larger than all of the others also has problems, because that donor has outsized influence. It's not super straightforward!
alper said "all" and "they": if it became expected and routine that companies donated, then we wouldn't need to worry about one outsized donor.
I took "all these" to mean the big AI companies, of which there are only a couple. Having two or three large donors from the same industry is marginally better than one, but not nearly as good as the ideal, which would be a lot of donations from many organizations, big and small, with no one donor or small group of them being the majority.
I don't know what the PSF's donor base looks like, but surely Python is important in more industries than just the big LLM labs.
I agree, we want the support spread much further than the AI labs. You can see the current sponsor line-up: https://www.python.org/psf/sponsors/ though Anthropic isn't on that page (yet?).
Also: money doesn't fix everything, and more money doesn't lead to proportionately more fixes. Maybe there's some low-hanging fruit like hosting or CI or paying salaries to existing contributors, so that first $1 million results in an additional 500 numberwangs of utility. But once you've used up all the low-hanging fruit, donating an additional $1 million would fund a committee to design a more moonshot-type project, resulting in a marginal increase in utility of only 130 nw. Still a good thing! It's just not proportional to the money put in.
(Obviously I'm making all that up, and I definitely don't want to discourage donations to good causes! Happy to hear from folks who have seen how money has helped open-source projects in the wild.)
foss-washing to compensate for prior events?
A company depending on the Python world doing the right thing and supporting the PSF?
I'm happy that Python is getting more money, but with it being right after Anthropic's "biggest" faux pas so far (regardless of actual lack of issues stemming from that)... If it is recovery for that, it feels both that they could have donated money at any time before now, and that, if they are planning to ever have a faux pas or gaffe in the future, that there is more they are willing to donate, but just not until another event happens.
Both feel mildly frustrating to me. If it is the case, then the best thing I can hope for is Anthropic to have as many mistakes as possible in the future, right?
It seems really unlikely to me that this donation would have been scrambled together in the last 24 hours to compensate for a misstep.
[edited for clarity] I'd assume, if not coincidence, it was planned to coincide with the timing of doing something that would be seen as negative, both of which were probably decided months ago.
Most companies, including extremely wealthy ones, don’t drop $1.5M at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t seem like a parsimonious explanation.
This comment is spot on. At best, these deals take many weeks and months, even under perfect conditions. Even approvals can take weeks or months, depending on when boards meet, and when people are back from vacations. Anthropic's "faus pas" didn't move the needle.
what am I missing in terms of recent Anthropic faux pas? I'm not finding any recent particular issues. Not a company I would touch with a 20 foot pole for lots of reasons, but is there something new?
People generally don’t like when the rules are changed, even (and sometimes, especially) when you didn’t enforce some rule and start enforcing it, rather than changing the rules.
I certainly don’t think it’s connected to this donation at all.
In my opinion, its very small, very very small, https://archaeologist.dev/artifacts/anthropic. However at the very least it has lead to a sour experience for multiple people who are vocal about it.
PSF could've stayed in consideration for the $1.5M from the NSF
The PSF made the right decision to turn down that grant. The terms were unreasonable and the risk too great.
Would you put your non-profit in a position where this administration could change its mind and demand $1.5m back from you at any time?
They could have added a zero to it and it would STILL be the right thing to turn it down.
the NSF grant had a looooot of strings attached to it.
While some might consider this Anthropic money to be tainted, the NSF grant had specific terms to it that were much more problem generatable, including after the money would hit the bank account.