Anthropic is donating $150 million to place 1,000 AI fellows inside nonprofit organisations across the United States. The programme, called Claude Corps, will pay early-career workers $85,000 plus benefits for a year-long placement where they help nonprofits use Claude more effectively. Applications opened Wednesday and close on July 17.

No college degree is required. Applicants must be 18 or older, hold US work authorisation, and have no more than two years of full-time work experience. The first cohort of 100 fellows starts in October 2026. Subsequent cohorts begin in January and August 2027.

Each of the 400+ host organisations will receive a $10,000 grant and free Claude credits. Anthropic partnered with CodePath, a San Francisco nonprofit that helps first-generation and low-income students enter the tech workforce, to manage recruitment and training.

“We hope this program will expand and become a pillar of our strategy to help humankind realize the benefits of AI while also managing its risks,” said Anthropic President Daniela Amodei.

The programme is modelled loosely on service corps like AmeriCorps and Teach For America, but with a corporate sponsor and a product at its centre. Fellows are trained specifically on Claude. The organisations they serve will build their workflows around Claude. When the fellowship ends, the nonprofits are left with AI infrastructure tied to Anthropic’s ecosystem.

That dual purpose has drawn criticism. Fortune noted the “fox guarding the henhouse” dynamic: a $965 billion AI company is training the nonprofit sector to depend on its own product, funded by a donation that represents less than 0.02% of its valuation. Anthropic frames it as philanthropy. Sceptics see distribution strategy wrapped in a public benefit narrative.

Regardless of the framing, the programme addresses a real gap. Most nonprofits lack the staff, budget, and technical knowledge to adopt AI tools, even when those tools could meaningfully improve operations. Anthropic’s $100M Claude Partner Network, launched earlier, targets enterprises. Claude Corps targets the organisations that cannot afford enterprise partnerships.

The timing is deliberate. Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and positioning itself as the responsible AI company in a field dominated by OpenAI’s commercial aggression and Google’s scale. A $150 million nonprofit fellowship is a narrative play as much as a product play. Whether 1,000 fellows can make a meaningful difference across 400 organisations depends on whether the programme outlasts its PR value. Anthropic’s policy framework, published this week, calls for AI’s benefits to be “broadly shared.” Claude Corps is its first concrete attempt to deliver on that promise.

A team of researchers at Georgia Tech has developed a new smartphone-based system that could dramatically simplify how people interact with robots. Called COBALT, the platform allows users with little to no computing experience to remotely control robot arms from virtually anywhere in the world using just a phone and an internet connection.

The project, developed at Georgia Tech’s People, AI & Robotics (PAIR) Lab, transforms smartphones into motion controllers for robotic arms. Users simply move their phones in different directions, and the robot mirrors those movements in real time. Basic tasks such as grabbing, moving, and releasing objects can be performed through simple on-screen controls, making the experience feel more like playing a mobile game than operating industrial machinery.

Ayush Agarwal, a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing who leads the COBALT research team, said the system was intentionally designed to make robotics accessible to beginners rather than experts. During testing, participants from countries including India, Indonesia, and Pakistan remotely controlled robot arms located inside Georgia Tech’s lab despite having no prior robotics experience.

Researchers believe crowdsourcing could shape the future of robotics

The broader goal behind COBALT extends beyond convenience. Researchers believe the platform could solve one of robotics’ biggest challenges: collecting enough real-world training data to improve AI-powered robotic systems.

Modern robots require enormous amounts of policy training data to learn how to perform physical tasks reliably. According to Assistant Professor Animesh Garg, who directs the PAIR Lab, simulation alone is not enough to train robots for large-scale deployment. Instead, researchers envision a crowdsourced network where millions of smartphone users passively contribute operational data by remotely interacting with robots.

Garg compared the idea to tapping into the nearly five billion smartphone users worldwide. By lowering the barrier to entry, the team hopes to create a scalable global system capable of accelerating robotic learning and automation.

The technology could also have major educational implications. Georgia Tech researchers recently demonstrated COBALT to students from Midtown High School in Atlanta, allowing them to remotely operate robot arms using smartphones. The simplicity of the interface could make robotics education more accessible in classrooms without expensive equipment or specialized hardware.

A future “gig economy” for robots may not be far away

The researchers also believe COBALT could eventually support entirely new forms of remote work. Garg described the possibility of a robot-powered gig economy where people remotely operate assistive robots in homes, warehouses, or factories from anywhere in the world.

In practical terms, that could mean a factory robot autonomously handles most tasks but requests human assistance when it encounters a difficult situation. Instead of requiring on-site workers, remote operators could briefly take control through their phones before handing the operation back to the AI system.

Agarwal said user studies showed smartphones were preferred over VR headsets, keyboards, or traditional controllers because they felt more intuitive while still providing high-quality control data. The system also minimizes latency by using WebRTC technology, similar to platforms like Zoom and Google Meet, ensuring that robot movements and live video streams remain responsive even across long distances.

The research paper on COBALT is being presented this week at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Vienna, where the team is showcasing not just the technology itself, but the large-scale remote operation network built around it.