SAN FRANCISCO, California: Anthropic and the Gates Foundation have launched a four-year, US$200 million partnership to support artificial intelligence projects focused on health, education, and other public-interest initiatives.

The two organizations said that each will contribute roughly half of the commitment.

Anthropic's contribution will include technical staff support and usage credits for its Claude chatbot, while the Gates Foundation will provide grant funding, program design, and technical expertise.

The initiative follows a separate $50 million agreement announced in January between the Gates Foundation and OpenAI to support 1,000 clinics and communities across Africa with AI tools by 2028.

The new partnership aims to ensure that the benefits of AI are shared more broadly at a time when concerns are growing that the technology could widen inequality and displace jobs.

One major focus will be on improving language accessibility.

Janet Zhou, a director at the Gates Foundation, said many AI systems perform poorly when writing and translating dozens of African languages.

To address this, the partnership plans to support data collection and labeling efforts that will be released publicly to improve AI models across the industry.

Another area under consideration is the creation of knowledge graphs to help AI systems better support teachers in sub-Saharan Africa and India.

"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.

The organizations also plan to equip research centers with Claude to help identify potential drug candidates for treating HPV and preeclampsia, conditions that have historically attracted less commercial investment from pharmaceutical companies.

Elizabeth Kelly, who leads Anthropic's beneficial deployments team, said the partnership aligns closely with the company's founding principles.

"This announcement is really core to who we are as a company," Kelly said.

Anthropic, backed by Google and Amazon, has grown rapidly as demand for its AI and coding tools has surged.