Blender pushes back on Anthropic

Welcome to VP Land! Fresh-ish off the NAB show floor, where we hunted down every AI tool worth talking about, we're back with the newsletter.

In today's edition:

Anthropic launched MCP connectors for nine creative applications, opening Claude up to drive Adobe Creative Cloud, Blender, Ableton, Affinity by Canva, Autodesk Fusion, Resolume Arena/Wire, SketchUp, and Splice. The Blender integration became the flashpoint.

To fund the official Blender connector, Anthropic joined as a Patron sponsor at €240,000 per year, roughly four full-time developers. Blender's existing user base and contributing developers pushed back with donation boycott threats, and Blender CEO Francesco Siddi acknowledged the misstep: "We should have opened up more conversation and perspectives from contributors before making this decision, and for that we are sorry."

Worth noting: the pushback came from Blender's own user base and contributors, the people who use the software daily. The Foundation traded ongoing developer funding for community trust.

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VP Land spent the week on the NAB 2026 show floor running booth interviews. The AI thread ran through nearly every aisle -- these four stood out.

The takeaway: previs, editing, asset management, and generation all shipped browser-first AI tools at this show. Full interviews are rolling out on the VP Land YouTube channel.

OpenAI explained the architecture behind GPT Image 2.0, framing it as a step beyond single-shot image generation.

What matters: the reasoning pattern that powered GPT-5.4 has now reached image generation, putting layout planning and self-checking inside the model rather than a wrapper around it.

Two AI video tools shipped upgrades that move generative video closer to broadcast and theatrical specs.

LTX released an HDR beta, the first AI video model to output HDR instead of 8-bit SDR. The grading implications are significant: highlights don't clip, shadows don't crush, and AI footage composites cleanly against CGI plates that already live in HDR. For colorists working with mixed sources, that closes the gap between AI-generated b-roll and primary photography.

Kling AI added one-click 4K generation to Video 3.0, putting native cinematic 4K output inside the model rather than relying on an upscaler. Subscribers get 20% off until May 7.

The takeaway: post-grading and downstream conform have been the practical bottlenecks for AI footage in real productions. HDR support and native 4K close two of the biggest spec gaps holding generative video out of broadcast pipelines.

A mission-driven look at how Project ETERNAL transforms drone-captured 360 footage into immersive, long-lasting 3D archives using Gaussian Splatting to preserve meaningful places.

Stories, projects, and links that caught our attention from around the web:

🎬 The Academy bars AI from Oscar acting and screenplay categories, requiring nominations be "demonstrably performed by humans with their consent."

📜 David Duvenaud and Alec Rad released Talkie, an open-weight 13B LLM trained only on pre-1930 data for historical-era language modeling.

🏆 FilmArena.ai benchmarks 40+ AI models with 2M+ votes from 190 countries, re-ranked weekly by subcategory.

🎫 FilmLA launched a Low Impact permit tier letting some projects skip fees and inspections.

🛡️ YouTube expanded deepfake detection to celebrities at CAA, UTA, WME, and Untitled, including those without YouTube channels.

🏛️ The Trump administration is discussing vetting new AI models before they're publicly released.

AI Architect & Technical Strategist - Remote

Machine Learning Engineer, PyTorch - Remote

Cuebric

Virtual Production Producer - Seoul, South Korea

Eyeline Studios

Unreal Engine Operator - Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Pixomondo

Mocap TD (Virtual Production Team) - India

DNEG VFX India

Virtual Production Supervisor - Dubai, UAE

Garage Studio

May 12

MPTS - Media Production & Technology Show 2026

London, UK

May 26

AI on the Lot 2026

Culver City, CA

🆕 May 31

Runway AI Film Festival 2026

New York, NY

🆕 Jun 1-6

SXSW London 2026

London, UK

🆕 Jun 18

Runway AI Film Festival 2026

Santa Monica, CA

View the full event calendar and submit your own events here.

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