The Blender Foundation have a brand new corporate patron at the highest published funding level (at least €240k per year) Anthropic AI. Anthropic are the creators of the incredibly popular LLM Claude. Details of the partnership from the Blender blog:
Blender Foundation is happy to announce that Anthropic is joining the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron.
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.
In these uncertain and divisive times, we appreciate Anthropic offering support to the Blender project in the form of a Patron-level membership. This enables the Blender team to keep pursuing projects independently, and to focus on building tools for artists and creators.
Francesco Siddi, CEO at Blender
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. More information about our funding policy is available at https://fund.blender.org/funding-policy/.
Key Links
Anthropic Blender Sponsorship Blog
You can learn more about Anthropic AI joining the Blender Foundation as a corporate patron in the video below.
EDIT – April 28th/2026 – 2:21PM EST
Anthropic just released a blog article called “Claude for Creative Work” in which they outline the various connectors available for Claude and media applications like Affinity, Adobe, SketchUp and Ableton. There is a category specific to Claude and Blender:
Blender is a free, open-source 3D creation suite used across industries, from indie game development and motion graphics to architectural visualization and film production.
The Blender developers have created an MCP connector, which is now officially available for Claude. For example, 3D artists can use the Blender connector to analyze and debug entire Blender scenes, or build custom scripts to batch-apply changes to objects in a scene. And using Blender’s Python API, the connector lets Claude add new tools directly to Blender’s interface.
Anthropic has joined the Blender Development Fund as a patron to support the Blender project as they continue to develop their Python API, which makes integrations like this possible. And because the connector is built on MCP, it is accessible to other LLMs in addition to Claude, a reflection of Blender’s commitment to open source and interoperability.