AI company Anthropic offers nonprofits discounts for Giving Tuesday

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced a suite of new offerings for nonprofit organizations Tuesday morning, joining Google and OpenAI in offering AI products to the nonprofit sector. Nonprofit organizations will have access to discounted pricing for Anthropic’s flagship Claude AI models in addition to tools geared toward nonprofit use. The announcement was made on Giving Tuesday, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, when many nonprofit groups and charities encourage donations and giving back. Elizabeth Kelly, head of beneficial deployments at Anthropic, said the new offerings will allow nonprofit groups to seize on the benefits of the company’s advanced AI systems. “We view this as a really important step in harnessing the power of AI for social impact and continuing to work towards world-changing applications of AI,” Kelly told NBC News. Anthropic will offer nonprofit organizations discounts of 70% to 75% on its Claude tools for businesses, depending on the exact product, along with specific technical tools optimized for nonprofit groups’ operational needs. Google offers similar discounts of 70% to 75% off its business and enterprise products, which feature expanded access to its Gemini AI models and general AI integrations within software like Google Docs and Sheets, while OpenAI offers discounts of 20% to 25%. Kelly emphasized that Anthropic worked closely with nonprofit organizations like poverty-fighting Robin Hood and Tipping Point to better understand how AI could help increase their impact. “We spent months in the pilot phase, working side by side with grantmakers and nonprofits, to really shape the features for nonprofits’ exact needs,” she said. As OpenAI has highlighted, nonprofit groups can use AI tools to draft grant applications, analyze complex data or create summaries of activities key to enticing future donors. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is one of the early beneficiaries of Anthropic's new scheme. The humanitarian organization works in over three dozen countries, providing health, education and economic support in conflict and disaster settings. Jeannie Annan, chief research and innovation officer for the IRC, said AI tools like Anthropic's Claude are already making a positive impact within the organization. As an example, Annan said that IRC staff members had used Claude to design training guides, health care provider assessments and role-play scenarios for health worker trainings on a sensitive health topic, with Claude "dramatically reducing development time while maintaining quality." “We have an organization of 12,000 staff in 40 different countries speaking many, many different languages,” Annan told NBC News. “Claude has allowed teams to move a lot more quickly with a range of different knowledge.” "I think AI is one of the few tailwinds that we have in the humanitarian sector. Right now, we have a lot of headwinds, so we’re trying to use AI as much as possible," Annan added, citing diminishing funding for humanitarian aid. Anthropic will also launch an educational program to help nonprofit groups learn how AI can augment and streamline their work. Kelly said that in designing this educational course, “we wanted to speak to the issues that nonprofits are dealing with day in and day out. For example, how do you analyze fundraising performance or build a fundraising campaign? How do you develop a program toolkit? How to use AI for a volunteer management system?” As part of Tuesday’s launch, Anthropic also debuted technical mechanisms to make its Claude systems easier to use with software tools and services popular in the nonprofit sector. “All of the really important work that goes into powering nonprofits, Claude can help automate so they can focus on human connection and maximize their impact,” Kelly said. She cited “strategic and finance operations, financial reporting, account reconciliations, audit, summarization” as examples of where Claude could provide helpful assistance.