Published January 14, 2026
Yesterday, the PSF announced that it was accepting a $1.5M donation from Anthropic. The money will come over the course of two years and will fund, among other things, the security work that the PSF turned down a grant from the US government for. The reaction in the Python community to the news has been somewhat mixed. There have been a lot of people who have the opinion that the PSF should have turned down the sponsorship. I can't say all of the reasons why people think that but I imagine that it comes down to one of two things:
I'm sure there are others. For me those are reasons to not use Anthropic's products (and I don't) but for the PSF to refuse money from them would be hypocritical.
The third argument I hear, which is not related to Anthropic but to the size of the sponsorship from a single company, is that Anthropic is trying to buy the PSF through this donation. That, in my opinion, is ludicrous. The PSF has shown that its dedication to its mission is above all (see the article on the $1.5M grant the PSF turned down.) The PSF also has mechanisms in place to keep any one company from having an outsized membership on the board of directors. The directors are, themselves, highly educated people with a dedication to the community that I don't think will be swayed one way or another.
Anthropic, like all large companies, has done things that many people find distateful, immoral, or unethical. I am hard pressed to name any company that I can't say that about. I can (but will not) point to other companies that sponsor, now or in the past, the PSF that I could make similar arguments against taking their money. If we are saying that Anthropic's donation should be refused, doesn't that mean that we are, in essence, saying that donations of all major corporations should be refused? I would like to ask you to point to any of the large tech companies and show that they have not made decisions that we would find ethically and morally questionable or distasteful. You can't. Neither can I. What I can say is that when these companies step up and do the right thing by giving back to the community we need to welcome that.
Going beyond what I have said about why the PSF was right to accept the no-strings-attached sponsorship, I would like to point out why individuals in the Open Source and Python communities saying that it should have been refused is also hypocritical. For years the Open Source community has been lamenting that large companies make their products and their money standing on the shoulders of volunteer maintainers. When one of those companies turns around and offers a large sum of money to help fund the continuation of the work being done we need to acknowledge that they are doing the right thing.
Thank you Anthropic for giving the PSF the money it needs to continue its amazing work of moving Python forward safely, securely, and inclusively. Thank you for doing the right thing and giving back to the community whose work enabled you. Hopefully some more large companies will see this and understand that they too need to give back.