Anthropic becomes the first AI startup to join the Frontier decarbonization alliance

Anthropic joins Frontier, a carbon removal group, contributing $915 million in new funding and marking its arrival as the first AI startup to join the team.

The new funding nearly doubled the pledges to Frontier, bringing the total to $1.8 billion. To date, Frontier has contracted nearly $700 million for more than 50 projects to offset 1.8 million tons of carbon. Companies that have pledged money to Frontier typically use the company’s carbon offset credits to reduce their publicly listed carbon footprints.

The new funding will help strengthen Frontier’s position in the carbon removal industry, but most notable are Anthropic’s promises. While Google is a founding member, Anthropic is the first pure AI company to join the ranks. Its membership comes at a time when AI companies have been buying power, not all of it has been clean.

Joining Frontier is Anthropic’s first climate-related agreement. The company has not yet produced a sustainability report, and has said it prefers an “all of the above” approach to energy use, a statement that translates into large purchases of polluting energy. But the move could signal a change in attitude at the company.

Frontier was founded by tech companies, including Stripe, Google, and Shopify, to help them deliver on their climate promises. Inventive companies, and others, are facing a dilemma: many want to eliminate illegal emissions in the next decade or two, but there are some emissions they can’t eliminate today, like air travel. But at the same time, carbon removal was a nascent industry with no major players to offset the amount of carbon companies needed. Frontier vets carbon removal companies and signs contracts for those he thinks will be able to deliver.

Carbon credits, like the kind supported by Frontier, allow companies to continue emitting certain emissions. Credits can be offset from their carbon footprint, similar to how profits can offset liabilities on a balance sheet. Frontier vets projects, serving as a kind of shared resource for companies interested in decarbonizing.

In announcing the new pledges, Frontier said funding for future projects will come with a higher level of scrutiny. The agency said it will fund a few projects, focusing on those it thinks have the best chance of removing a gigaton — 1 billion tons — of CO.₂ or more per year. The new contracts will run for eight to 10 years, Frontier said.

Since launching in 2022, Frontier has supported a variety of carbon sequestration technologies over the years, including direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, bio-oil, marine antacids, and bioenergy through carbon sequestration and sequestration.

Frontier’s shift from many small bets to a few big ones mimics what appears to be happening at Microsoft, which has been the largest purchaser of carbon credits.

While companies want the carbon emissions market to grow and mature, they make it clear they don’t want to write it off forever. In any new contract signed, the carbon-emitting company must “show a path to government subsidies/subsidies,” a Frontier spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that technology to remove carbon dioxide will be needed if the world is to reach net zero emissions, although few companies or consumers are interested in footing the bill. As with clean water, the problem will likely fall to governments in the end. Frontier said it will operate until 2040.

It did not say what would happen after that, but it is clear that they hope that the governments will have started taking power by then. Or what if they don’t? At the rate of climate warming, we will have serious problems on our hands.