By Jeffrey Dastin
SAN FRANCISCO, May 14 (Reuters) - Anthropic and the Gates Foundation have pledged $200 million to back artificial intelligence-related public goods and areas including health and education, they said on Thursday.
Support from Anthropic's technical staff and usage credits for its Claude AI will account for its half of the financial commitment, while the Bill Gates co-founded Gates Foundation will provide grant funding, program design and expertise, officials told Reuters.
The commitment
will span four years.
The news follows a $50 million pact that the Gates Foundation and OpenAI announced in January to support 1,000 African clinics and communities with AI by 2028.
Against a backdrop of fears that AI could displace jobs and widen inequality, the new partnership is hoping to ensure the technology benefits more people.
One area of focus is language accessibility.
AI systems have performed poorly in writing and translating dozens of African languages, so Anthropic and the foundation want to support better data collection and labeling that would be released publicly to help improve models across the industry, said Janet Zhou, a Gates Foundation director.
Another area under consideration is releasing so-called knowledge graphs that could help AI systems better meet the needs of teachers in sub-Saharan Africa and India, Zhou said.
The public-goods focus has come from "the needs of different partners and governments, including some of the fears that they may have around proprietary lock-in and sovereignty," Zhou said.
One initiative will equip research centers to use Claude to predict drug candidates for treating HPV and preeclampsia, diseases that have been less commercially attractive for pharmaceutical companies to research, Zhou and Anthropic's Elizabeth Kelly said.
Anthropic, a startup backed by Google and Amazon.com whose value has soared on demand for its AI and coding tools, is embracing the work to fulfill what Kelly described as its founding mission to benefit humanity.
"This announcement is really core to who we are as a company," said Kelly, who leads Anthropic's beneficial deployments team.
(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Himani Sarkar)
