Anthropic has become the first standalone artificial intelligence company to join Frontier, the corporate carbon removal coalition, lending its name to a fresh $915 million round of funding aimed at scaling technologies that pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
The commitment, announced in London on Wednesday, nearly doubles the money pledged through Frontier since its launch in 2022, bringing the running total to $1.8 billion. The coalition has so far contracted close to $700 million across more than 50 projects, covering roughly 1.8 million tons of permanent carbon removal. Members typically draw on those purchases to offset emissions they cannot yet eliminate.
A "baton pass" for carbon removal
Frontier was created by a group of large companies, including Stripe, Google, Shopify, and consulting firm McKinsey, to solve a chicken-and-egg problem that had stalled the sector for years. Carbon removal startups struggled to raise money for large facilities because few buyers were willing to commit to credits before the technology had proven itself. Frontier vets promising companies and signs advance contracts, giving founders the demand certainty needed to build.
Leaders of the coalition described the new funding as a turning point, calling it a "baton pass" into a more mature phase of buying. For Hannah Bebbington Valori, who heads Frontier, the expanded war chest and Anthropic's arrival are encouraging signs that carbon removal remains "part of any rigorous climate program."
Existing backers echoed that confidence. Randy Spock, who leads carbon credits and removals at Google, said the company believes in "the power of science and technology to mitigate planetary warming," and called Frontier's mission a cornerstone of that approach as Google expands its support alongside other large buyers.
Why Anthropic's entry matters
While Google has been a founding member, Anthropic is the first pure-play AI developer to join the ranks, and the move marks the company's first climate-related deal. That distinction carries weight at a moment when AI firms are racing to secure electricity for power-hungry data centres, often through purchases that include fossil fuels.
The company, best known for its Claude chatbot, has not yet published a sustainability report. It has previously described its energy strategy as an "all of the above" approach, a phrase that in practice has tended to mean buying power from a wide mix of sources. Neither Anthropic nor its rival OpenAI has disclosed emissions to the Foundation Model Transparency Index, a research effort that tracks the environmental footprint of leading models, which makes the decision to back carbon removal stand out.
What Anthropic says about the move
An Anthropic spokesperson framed the pledge as an effort to help build a market for carbon removal and storage by supporting the young companies trying to develop it. Carbon removal, the spokesperson said, is one piece of a broader portfolio of climate solutions, and the early-stage industry needs sustained investment if it is going to mature and reach meaningful scale.
Notably, the company did not tie the purchase directly to the emissions from its planned data centres or its rising power consumption. The investment, according to the spokesperson, is aimed instead at the long-term challenge of removing carbon that has accumulated in the atmosphere over decades. Buying removal credits does nothing to cut the electricity a data centre draws, ease strain on local grids, or reduce water use, a limitation that critics of corporate carbon accounting are quick to point out.
A leaner, more selective strategy
Alongside the cash, Frontier signalled a sharper focus for how it will spend. The organisation said it would back fewer projects and concentrate on those with a credible path to removing a gigaton, or one billion metric tons, of CO2 or more each year. It plans roughly 10 to 15 targeted bets through longer offtake contracts running eight to ten years, with some stretching as far as 2040.
The next wave of money will flow toward four families of technology: ocean alkalinity enhancement, which boosts the sea's natural capacity to absorb CO2; biomass-based removal; enhanced rock weathering, which speeds up the way certain rocks lock away carbon; and direct air capture, which uses industrial systems and chemistry to pull CO2 straight from the air. Frontier believes these approaches could collectively reach gigaton scale, though each still carries steep costs and technical risk. Direct air capture, for instance, can run to hundreds of dollars per ton removed.
Describing the shift, Valori said the original commitment was about getting carbon removal "off the starting line," while the new "Growth AMC" is about pushing the strongest companies toward a scale that can sustain robust, long-term demand.
The demand question and the Microsoft backdrop
The timing is significant. Microsoft, by far the largest historic buyer of carbon removal, having purchased around 70 million tons, slowed its buying earlier this year, removing a major source of demand from a fragile market. Frontier re-upping at this point offers reassurance that corporate appetite has not evaporated.
Even so, the coalition's members have made clear they do not intend to fund the industry forever. Every new deal, Frontier said, must come with a "clear line of sight to government-driven demand" by the time the contract expires. Companies will favour projects in regions with meaningful carbon removal policies and a believable theory for how public support will eventually cover the cost of the tons delivered. The sector got a separate lift this month when the Science Based Targets initiative said it would require companies to use removals to cover a small but rising share of their ongoing emissions from 2035 onward, a rule that could steadily expand future demand.
The bigger picture
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that carbon dioxide removal will be necessary if the world is to reach net zero, yet few companies or consumers are eager to pay for it. Like clean water and other public goods, the burden is widely expected to land on governments in time. Frontier has said it will write contracts as far out as 2040, betting that policy and public money will have stepped in by then.
Anthropic's move may nudge other AI developers to make similar pledges, and Frontier's leadership has been blunt that more should follow. Pressed on the absence of OpenAI from such efforts, Valori suggested the wider industry deserves tougher questions about what it is doing to decarbonise, and that the scrutiny should not fall on Anthropic alone. For now, though, the AI sector's soaring energy demand remains the harder problem, and a single carbon removal pledge, however large, does little to change that arithmetic.
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