Anthropic has made a large contribution to the Python Software Foundation

Seems like a good time to throw out a reminder regarding "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure" by Nadia Asparouhova. While she may have published it in 2016, it's still relevant today and speaks to the need for the private sector generally (looking at you VC firms) to support and understand the open source work, hours of unfunded labor, powering our societies.

https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep...

This makes sense given how much of the current AI ecosystem is built on top of Python. I hope this helps the foundation improve security for everyone who relies on these libraries.

Still crazy how little investment goes to Python given how critical it is to the ecosystem.

Source: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/12/anthropic-invests-in-py...

Looking at you Deepmind and OpenAI

Glad to see Anthropic continuing to invest in the longevity and quality of their open-source dependencies!

If you missed it, they bought Bun a while back, which is what Claude Code is built in: https://bun.sh/blog/bun-joins-anthropic

It's certainly better than absolute nothing!

I did not know you could make donations with a string attached ("improve security")...

They are probably trying to build influence. Why is a startup that is burning cash donating money?

It's easy to donate, since it's not their money. They are not profitable. Just Nvidia's money, they're paying themselves for new GPUs and datacenters.

Which seems intellectually frustrating. The python foundation was only short money because they refused to accept a 1.5 million dollar federal grant from the Trump admin for political reasons (I believe a condition of the money was it couldn't be used for DEI). They have now received 1.5 million from Anthropic, which is VC funded and burning cash.

I find these matters are often more complex than I can understand from a headline but this feels like Anthropic bailed out the PSF because PSF is making bad management decisions, and bailing them out might be a bad long-term play.

Just recently I heard that typed languages are best for agentic programming

I must be the only one in here who thinks $1.5M is a small sum compared to Anthropic's size and the amount of value they have gotten out of Python. Good press is cheaper than I thought.