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  • Hacker News
  • What are the odds these nonprofits were chosen due to proximity to communities with contentious datacenter buildouts?
    by twalla
  • This lands with religious undertones for me, as it sounds like a missionary deployment program, albeit with a paid salary.
    by 6thbit
  • It's uncanny that they picked the term "Corps", which is exactly what Kurt Vonnegut used for the "Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps" in his 1952 novel, Player Piano. Also known as "Reeks and Wrecks" in the book, it's one of the two career paths, aside from joining the Army, for the workers displaced by machines and artificial intelligence. The irony seems to be lost on Anthropic.

    I enjoyed Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle very much, so I've been slowly reading my way through his earlier works, and while his first novel is not as entertaining, it's surprisingly relevant today. There's Vonnegut's prescience about the impact of technology on society, of course, but even the description of a corporate retreat in the book, that he wrote with almost 75 years ago, hits too close to home.

    by kajkojednojajko
  • It's not uncanny. They read dark science fiction as an instruction manual.
    by philipwhiuk
  • Well played, Anthropic. - Nvidia gives AI labs money to run their models. - AI labs give money to AI engineers to use the models. - Companies are getting hooked on AI products. - AI engineers are getting hooked on AI products. - Regular Software Engineers are getting devalued/replaced by low-skill AI engineers. - Their employers get more money to spend on AI.
    by peterdemin
  • This is an avenue I think will eventually be tried as a monetisation path: Models that are fully unavailable to company outsiders, you can just hire consultants that will be thin layers to the model. That way the costs that will come are more palatable since you pay for a hired person rather than a product/service.
    by torben-friis
  • They already have a consulting partnership with KPMG as part of a Strategic Alliance

    https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-kpmg

    by htrp
  • Surprised how negative most of the comments are.

    A lot of nonprofits could benefit from someone helping them implement AI and most are 1) competent enough to ensure the fellow hands off their projects before they leave, and 2) to decide if it’s worth continuing to pay for Claude or not.

    It’s great the fellows are paid so they are at least somewhat accountable vs volunteers who are often unreliable.

    All that said, I bet 80% of what these fellows end up doing is automating fundraising emails…

    by chaseadam17
  • I'm negative on this proposal because it sounds like Anthropic put the cart before the horse. Today, at this very moment, 9 out of 10 non-profits and NGOs run of IT infrastructure wholly dependent on email servers, office software, and phone calls. For Anthropic to create a positive result from flooding the space with cut-rate FDEs, NGOS would need to have in-place the sort of infrastructure that could accommodate whatever widgets Sonnet generate, not to mention the right personnel to manage that infrastructure long-term. If an NGO's IT Department is already positioned properly to embrace a Claude Corps Missionary, they near-certainly wouldn't need a Claude Corps Missionary because they would need to publicly justify that department's existence year-after-year. So what does this actually look like for the chosen organizations, other than a sales pitch.
    by Shalomboy
  • Claude Corps, Forward Deployed Engineers, Strategic Token Reserves… what’s with all these military inspired naming conventions in AI? We’re just typing softly on keyboards…
    by deadbabe
  • lmfao
    by rainprincess
  • It goes hard in today's environment ig
    by airstrike
  • Americans high on their own propaganda. It's cringeworthy.
    by sph
  • Reminds me more of Peace Corps.
    by brentm
  • Palantir had first mover advantage on FDE rebranding of sales engineer, and so its the term that stuck
    by yieldcrv
  • A trained AI operator will neutralise threats to your production.
    by dude250711
  • Time to deploy to the staging environment after discussing it in the war room.
    by dewey
  • I did not have AI missionaries on my bingo card this year.
    by Isaackoz
  • Send them all to Mars to build their Cult Mechanicus.
    by sph
  • I had to read this twice to understand what they're actually proposing here. The entire premise behind AI is that it can amplify (and in some cases) replace human workers. The blog seems completely backwards to what they're advertising to the enterprise in sales.

    -- edit --

    After more reading I find this really funny: "Enforcement and regulatory authority with teeth. The government should be able to block or deter the deployment of models that pose a significant risk of catastrophic harm. We must also avoid overly broad or heavy-handed regulatory power. Our framework proposes both a mechanism for blocking dangerous deployments, and concrete safeguards that would prevent that power from being misused. Policymakers could begin with a lighter-touch approach, then adapt this as model capabilities advance and the evaluation ecosystem matures." (They link to https://www.anthropic.com/policy-on-the-ai-exponential in this blog post)

    by himata4113
  • I believe this is an attempt to try out a possible answer to the problem of "If AI makes it non-viable for individual companies to pay junior devs, there will be no junior devs". The posited theory: Maybe the AI companies pay them off what is effectively a tax on the industry as a whole (that they can extract because every company has no choice but to pay their fees). It's pretty dystopian so I hope this isn't the future, but... maybe worth trying as an experiment?
    by clhodapp
  • > replace human workers

    Plenty of charity nonprofits have no/few employees and depend on volunteers for office work. Think animal shelter, food bank, etc. Having a bot perform things like bookkeeping, volunteer coordination, etc would free up volunteers for other things. It wouldn't take many tokens.

    If Anthropic wanted some serious PR karma they would include a light usage plan for five or ten years in addition to the engineer to get them started.

    by imglorp
  • > The entire premise behind AI is that it can amplify (and in some cases) replace human workers. This seems completely backwards to what they're advertising to the enterprise in sales.

    idgi. I'm pretty sure this is also exactly what they've been telling enterprise. This has been the line I've been hearing consistently from them (and everyone else).

    by lkbm
  • This is what always confuses me about the “keep up or get left behind” crowd. Either these tools are gods in boxes and we’re all going to be replaced or they are actually something that you can gain expertise around. If you can gain expertise around them then sure there’s value in keeping up. But those shouting we’ve all gotta keep up are mostly the same claiming they are building god boxes. It genuinely has to be one or the other. Something isn’t a god box if you have to learn how to best use it.
    by roxolotl
  • This seems like one way to saddle nonprofits with functional, but potentially very expensive systems, set up by someone who helps them for a year then disappears and leaves them with no expertise to do long-term cost control or functionality improvements.
    by 827a
  • "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
    by danielrmay
  • They know it's a temporary job going in, though. How is this different than having an intern?

    If they're not using this opportunity to train other staff then that seems like a management problem.

    by skybrian
  • I don't suppose you have experience with how badly small non-profits are fucked by every tech consultancy they ever work with? They are paying for a service at the very top of their budget, and receiving services perceived from the bottom, as almost "pro bono" by the consultancy, via intern labour.

    They all have PTSD from the status quo.

    Getting nonprofits into AI that feels even marginally more self-serve, that is a step forward. Again, even if it just feels more agentic, that's a step forward -- maybe even if they end up screwing things up more in the process -- because the lack agency with their tech is so demoralizing in the sector

    by patcon
  • Having had to fix the messes of several green-washing consultants from PWC, JP Morgan Chase etc. I can confirm that this is absolutely guaranteed.
    by drcongo
  • They've already done this through the 6m Anthropic API "unlimited plan" grants. Claude-only is getting embedded.
    by noemit