Wanted to talk a bit about some AI related news to Blender recently, in which there are 4 main things that happened.
- Blender content creator Andrew “Blender Guru” Price is outed as an AI grifter
- Anthropic becomes a Corporate Patron of the Blender Foundation
- Anthropic launches Claude integration with Blender
- Blender revokes Anthropic’s Corporate Patron status
First, something lighthearted. Blender Guru’s been a bit of a controversial figure for a while in the Blender community, but his recent promotion of AI generated content has given people more reason to dislike him. The 3D artist twitter community spent about a week clowning on him, and retroactively criticizing some of his earlier work, like this one slide from a 2018 talk he did at Blender Con where he estimates the price of a traffic cone asset in production as costing $3,600, among other incredulous prices.
Image Source: https://x.com/AndrewNameless/status/2045805676153205135?s=20
A lot of people responded by speedrunning traffic cone models, and eventually Blender Guru responded by setting his twitter profile picture to an image of him wearing a traffic cone.
The end result of all of this is that his reptuation has seemingly gotten much worse than it already was, and he has seemingly lost a lot of his good will and credibility as a 3D professional.
Then about three days ago, Blender announced Anthropic would be joining their development fund as a Corporate Patron, in which they’d be joining the likes of Wacom, Netflix Animation, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Meta, Adobe, and a bunch of other corporate partners (full list here). I honestly don’t know what the extent of a Corporate Patron is, whether they have power in what gets publicly updated to the software or pushed officially. Regardless, this received a lot of public pushback.
At the same time, Anthropic announced the ability to use Claude as a tool inside of Blender to perform a variety of tasks. In the video they showcase Claude applying textures to some rocks in a scene, and deleting and modifying objects. A lot of these batch operations have been possible through script automation in the past, so this isn’t anything new. It’s important to mention that Claude isn’t generating any meshes or textures with AI here. It’s just performing simple operations.
Whether or not Claude is actually useful is still up in the air. I’m not going to experiment with it personally, because the usecase honestly isnt that common in my work, and I cant see this saving much time for me that couldn’t be saved in easier and faster ways. A professional 3D artist George Crudo posted a thread on twitter where he tested the tools, and shows off its lack of competence. Crudo has a history of being critical against AI in 3D workflows, and has analyzed other AI tools similarly in the past, showing how ineffective they are as tools for artists.
Back to Blender. Today, they announced that they’d be revoking Anthropic’s Corporate Patron status and will instead accept Anthropic’s funds as a donation rather than as a Corporate Patron. It sounds like the Blender Foundation will now be more public on their decisions to interact with any AI company, but it does not seem to be ruled out entirely. Despite this incident, their Corporate Patrons page still lists Meshy.ai, an AI 3D Model Generation platform. So whether or not Blender will work with AI in the future is still up in the air.
(UPDATE: MAY 3RD 2026 - MeshyAI has been removed from Blender’s list of patrons)
My personal opinion is that AI as an Agent tool to perform tasks in Blender doesn’t sound so bad on the surface. Thereotically this would mean no generative content, no asset creation. Maybe it could be useful to perform batch operations using human language rather than script, but the cost of using such a tool kind of drowns out the usefulness in my opinion. Even if it were effective, which it is seemingly not, its only providing something you can already do for free, and at that point it feels like you’re throwing away money. By using Claude you would be restricted by their membership models as well. This isn’t even getting into the environment concerns of supporting LLMs or the political concerns of supporting anything related to Anthropic, given their history with the US Government even if that is now seemingly terminated.
I haven’t used any agentic AI tools, so I only hear the stories of AI destroying people’s entire repos and going rogue. It’s hard to take all these stories seriously though, with how many fake posts are made where an AI is prompted to “act like it’s going rogue”, or the fake moltbook situation earlier this year.
I try to take a pragmatic stance towards AI. If the tools can genuinely be used as tools and are effective and useful, then I’m willing to humor it. I’m strongly against image generation and video generation, as I believe the cost to be dramatically more expensive than text and am concerned of the environment impacts it would leave with rising power costs, and also the negative outcomes it could have for society at large, such as misinformation and harassment.
Despite this I personally see no real use in a tool like what Claude advertises. Even if it was effective, this provides very little use in my day to day workflow in Blender. Maybe that’s due to my specialization as a Character Artist, maybe environment artists or someone working on a movie would find power here. Even if it worked, even if cost wasnt a concern, and even if the political reasons to never engage with AI were ignored, it seems pretty useless.
Somewhat interestingly, Unity I believe was investing in a similar AI tool that would allow you to prompt an AI to spawn gameobjects and place them around the environment. I dont know how far that really went, I think I saw this roughly 2-3 years ago, but it didn’t seem that useful then either.