Anthropic has joined Frontier’s carbon removal coalition as part of a fresh $915 million funding push, making it the first AI startup to participate in the initiative. The latest commitments also bring Salesforce into the group and raise Frontier’s total pledges to $1.8 billion.
Frontier, a coalition backed by major technology and corporate buyers, has announced $915 million in new funding commitments to support long-term carbon removal projects. The latest round adds Anthropic and Salesforce to its list of participants and marks a notable step for the climate technology market, where demand from large companies is increasingly shaping the growth of carbon removal solutions.
Anthropic’s entry is especially significant because it makes the company the first pure AI startup to join Frontier. The move comes at a time when artificial intelligence companies are facing growing attention over the energy demands of their models and infrastructure. For Anthropic, this is also its first climate-related deal.
Founded in 2022 by companies including Stripe, Google and Shopify, Frontier was created to help accelerate carbon removal technologies by giving developers advance purchase commitments. The model is designed to give emerging carbon removal companies clearer demand signals, allowing them to build, finance and scale projects with more confidence.
With the latest commitments, Frontier’s total funding pledge now stands at $1.8 billion.
The coalition is calling the new funding round a “Growth AMC”, short for advance market commitment. The shift also signals a more focused strategy. Rather than spreading capital across a large number of early-stage experiments, Frontier now plans to concentrate on around 10 to 15 selected partnerships. These deals are expected to be backed by offtake contracts lasting eight to ten years, with some commitments stretching as far as 2040.
The focus will be on carbon removal approaches that Frontier believes have the strongest potential to reach gigaton-scale impact. These include direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, ocean alkalinity enhancement and biomass-based removal methods.
Frontier is also tightening expectations for future partners. Companies seeking new contracts will need to show a realistic path toward government subsidies or compliance-driven revenue before their agreements expire. That condition points to a wider challenge in the carbon removal industry: private buyers are helping the market grow, but long-term scale may depend on policy support and regulated demand.
“The question today in carbon removal is whether demand will keep pace with that technology development and will demand scale to the size that the world needs in order to meet global climate goals,” Frontier head Hannah Bebbington Valori told The Wall Street Journal.
Frontier has not disclosed how much each participating company is contributing in the latest round.
Since its launch, the coalition has contracted nearly $700 million across more than 50 projects to remove 1.8 million tons of carbon. In 2025, seven portfolio companies delivered roughly 23,000 tons of carbon removal. Frontier expects that figure to cross 50,000 tons this year.
The broader carbon removal market has expanded sharply in recent years. Data from CDR.fyi shows total credit sales are now approaching $12 billion, compared with only a few hundred million dollars annually four years ago. Microsoft has been the biggest force in that market, buying around 37 million credits, which The Wall Street Journal puts at about three-quarters of all engineered carbon removal purchases so far.
Anthropic has not yet published a sustainability report. The company has previously said it supports an “all of the above” approach to energy.
For Frontier, the latest funding push is less about one company joining a climate coalition and more about whether carbon removal can move from promising technology to large-scale deployment.
The addition of Anthropic also brings the AI sector closer to a market that may become increasingly important as computing demand continues to grow.
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