Seeing some of the comments here speculating about ulterior motives, I'd like to say there are probably none other than the usual (goodwill, publicity, taxes, etc.) A little known aspect of the Gates Foundation finances, their problem really isn't getting more money. Their biggest problem is spending their money faster than it grows.

Yep this is an interesting thing that most of us don't tend to think about when it comes to philanthropy (or even gov spending) ... it's really really hard to _spend_ money effectively.

Because there's all the work around accountability, checking for fraudulent applications, checking if your money made an impact, deciding where to even focus, all those things.

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/

That's a clear signal that little analysis has gone into the numbers and, most generously, there's nothing but the shape of a deal the details of which will be ironed out and adjusted in practice.

I get that the amounts of funding and capital being sat on for the respective parties are collossal and lead to rounding that doesn't make sense from the point of view of an individual any more (what's a few million at this scale, just round up to nearest 10, etc) but deal sizes of literally round numbers of 100s start to stretch credibility on whether any real analysis was involved.

In fact it'd be a ridiculous coincidence if it had been. They're the kind of figures where you'd recheck your calculations to check it's right as it seems too perfectly round.

Crazy how they can just lie to this extent without consequences. Or still get paid millions for making bad deals, meaning incompetence

The worst were the ones where long after all the cocktails were drunk, some executive (too stupid to understand the vapid nature of these partnerships) got it into his mind to "check up on the progress of the cooperation". That mess predictably rolled downhill because nobody was willing to tell them the truth.

If you're going to partner with a charitable Gates, choose the good one (though to be fair, she's probably going to be far more discerning).

And Anthropic's decision to become complicit in poisoning Memphis with Grok's methane turbines already put the lie to the idea they are the conscientious ones when it comes to large AI companies.

For reference: most enterprise commitments I've seen quoted near this range are training + dedicated capacity + a research collab. This one reads more like a multi-year managed-services contract attached to a delivery organization. Whether it produces anything depends entirely on the Foundation's eval-pipeline maturity — and historically large grant-making orgs aren't fast at standing those up.

The prompt-cache-window joke up-thread actually hits the right structural question: is $200M effectively the volume discount for committing 5-year batched workloads, or is it new R&D dollars? The press release wording is careful enough that I read it as the former.

not emphatically both?

Odd to say.

despite him controlling the Foundation.

What for though? I always hear this, but what's the point of it?

They do good work on infection disease, vaccines, and childhood mortality in the world but this partnership speaks to the worst of what the foundation does. I hope someone there has some perspective for where they have wasted charitable funds and can use that insight here.

Like most, I’d much rather my food not be spiked at all.

out here in the normal world, doing any of this surreptitious stuff is wrong,

and if you’re following, it’s only the tip of their iceberg.

It's still unbelievably scummy to infect your partner with a disease and then drug that partner because you're too much of a coward to come forward about it. Adultery is already bad, infecting your partner because of that adultery is bad, drugging them to cover it up is bad.

As for the value of Bill Gates as a husband or of his foundation, the positives don't outweigh the negatives. I have no problem saying with certainty that this is a bad move on Anthropic's part, because anything that Gates Foundation does could be done under an untarnished name.

By offering it for "free" as part of the OS. Which they could only do because they never intended to pay the developers who wrote it.

In a classic Microsoft move they fucked over their competition, their partners and the entire ecosystem for well over a decade.

Plus during this time there was little competition on the desktop market in general. iPhone and smart phones, and the Apple resurgence, was yet to come.

Netscape 4.x crashed every 20 minutes. Mozilla (before Firefox) was barely usable. Chrome was no where to be seen yet.

To explain: first, they did not pay proper taxes, in particular the older Evil here. But even more importantly, in the USA a foundation can own patents, among other things. They need to give out a certain % on a yearly basis, but basically it is a corporation.

Read through the antitrust stuff that happened in the 90's. He's not a good guy. I know he puts on this persona of "geeky nice guy", and I'll admit that I fell for it too long, but he's a multi billionaire, and like other multi billionaires he is not a good person.

If he is the "least evil person you can think of", then you're not thinking very hard.

You could probably amend this to "billionaires", instead of the qualifying "multi billionaires".

ETA: You know, I was thinking, just because I qualified it with "multi" in front doesn't really imply that single-billionaires aren't evil. I didn't specify that serial killers are evil either, but I don't think me not specifying that implies that I think they're fine.