AI for Non Profits Network: Weekly Briefing 05/26
The weekly digest from a network of non-profits interested in AI. In this week's briefing: Anthropic and the Gates Foundation strike philanthropy's biggest AI deal yet; and lots of great resources.
In The Briefing this week:
👀 What's Caught our Eye: Anthropic and the Gates Foundation put $200M on the table
💭 Thought for the Week: Humanity AI's first cohort went to its friends. The open call is where the coalition either widens out or doesn't.
⭐ Interesting News and Funding Calls
🌐 From Across the Network
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1) 👀 What Caught Our Eye: Anthropic and the Gates Foundation put $200M on the table
On May 14, Anthropic and the Gates Foundation announced a four-year, $200 million partnership across global health, life sciences, education and economic mobility - grants, Claude credits, and Anthropic engineering time pooled into a single commitment. Anthropic calls it the largest deal of its kind between an AI company and a global philanthropy.
The structure is interesting: The largest single slice goes to health work in low- and middle-income countries, where roughly 4.6 billion people lack access to essential health services. Named programs: AI-assisted vaccine and therapy screening for overlooked diseases, starting with polio, HPV and eclampsia/preeclampsia. Named partners: the Institute for Disease Modeling, which sits inside the Gates Foundation, on malaria and tuberculosis forecasting. The education strand puts Claude behind K-12 tutoring tools in the US and foundational literacy and numeracy apps in sub-Saharan Africa and India. The mobility strand funds portable skills records and career guidance for people moving into or retraining for the US workforce. Datasets, benchmarks and African-language data are due to be released as public goods later this year.
The partnership itself is also newsworthy - Anthropic is putting in compute, credits and engineers. Gates is putting in domain access, implementing partners, and political cover. Both sides come out with something they could not buy on the open market.
Why it matters for nonprofits. Some version of this partnership is about to be pitched to large nonprofits and mid-sized funders. It will not be at this scale; the structure might be similar - one question to ask is what each side is putting in and what each side is taking out.
2) 💭 Thought for the Week: A coalition’s first grants always go to its friends
The Humanity AI coalition - ten of the largest US foundations, including MacArthur, Ford, Mellon, Mozilla, Omidyar and Packard - announced its first round of grantmaking on May 12. The headline number was $18 million. Eight million went to nine organizations at half a million each, including the AI Now Institute, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Partnership on AI, the Pulitzer Center and Student Defense’s SHAPE AI. Three million went to a new “AI Civics” program led by Data & Society with the Digital Public Library of America. The remaining ten million will go out in an open call this summer.
Four days later, Inside Philanthropy made the obvious point in print: every inaugural grantee had already been funded by one of the ten founders. John Palfrey, MacArthur’s president, told the magazine those organizations were the ones with “a long track record of making a difference on AI” who were “simply short of capital.” Fair enough as a starting move. Chantal Forster, formerly of the Technology Association of Grantmakers, put the sharper version on the record: “The existing set of grantees are all East-Coast- and West-Coast-based - what’s missing are groups in the heartland, groups in the South… it’s ignoring the rural question.”
The grantees announced this month are excellent organizations. They are also the ones anyone who has been to a tech-policy convening in the last decade could have listed on the back of a napkin without consulting the press release. The first cohort is not a coalition betting on new voices. It is a coalition consolidating around its existing ones.
The legible grantee - track record, staff, indirect-cost rate, relationships - is the safe grantee. Funders feel pressure to move quickly, as Palfrey said, and quickness costs you reach. The organizations Forster is describing - rural, Southern, building from inside affected communities rather than commenting from outside them - do not have the same intake apparatus. They will only appear in the open call, and only if the open call is structured to find them.
So the test is the open call. Ten million dollars, opening this summer. The criteria, the outreach, the geography of the review panel, and the indirect-cost rate of the eventual grants are the four things that will tell you whether Humanity AI is doing AI philanthropy differently, or whether it is the same circle with a better logo on the cover sheet.
A couple of quick thoughts:
Watch the open call, not the inaugural list. The first cohort tells you who the coalition already trusts. The open call tells you whether it is trying to enlarge that circle.
Ask your own board the same question. When your organization last hired, funded or partnered - was the first move to your friends?
3) ⭐ Interesting News and Funding Calls
Humanity AI’s $10M open call - opening this summer. Criteria, application window and panel composition not yet announced. Watch the Humanity AI site and join the mailing list there.
CEP’s State of Nonprofits 2026 - released May 14. The most authoritative recent read of the operating conditions the sector is in. Headline numbers: 46% of CEOs say their own burnout is “very much” a concern (up from just under 30% in 2025); 57% say foundation grants have been harder to secure since January 2025; 39% are running a deficit, up from 22% in 2022. Read this before any board conversation about AI investment. Report.
Code for America + Anthropic - the SNAP Policy Navigator - announced at the Code for America Summit on May 8. A Claude-based tool that gives caseworkers a plain-language, sourced answer to specific SNAP policy questions, with eligibility decisions deliberately left with the human. The most concrete public-interest AI deployment in our window, and a useful model for human-in-the-loop scoping.
4) 🌐 From Across the Network
Have an event, case study, gathering or interesting insight you would like to share with the network? Drop us a note by replying to this email.
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