This doesn't seem to be investment focussed activity, but rather extending Claude credits for education and research. Which is a good thing, independent of other bad things that might be happening.
IANAA, but pretty sure you can only deduct a donation against business profit. Are you suggesting that Anthropic is running at a profit?
Net Operating Losses (NOLs) in one year can offset taxes owed in future years. It works for personal taxes too if it's a "casualty" loss.
you can often carry over the losses for multiple years sometimes.
Who profits from that deduction and how?
Anthropic profits from the PR, for one. And they likely hook these institutions on their products in the long term, for two – much like I was "stuck" on Azure until recently, thanks to their free startup credits pointing me to it a decade ago.
One assumes Anthropic given it's them doing the donating, but you also have to be actually making a profit to be paying tax.
There are ways one can engage in financial engineering (is "accounting engineering" a term yet?) where despite not making a profit, you segregate a tax break, tax credit, charitable deduction, etc. into some other entity and then can sell that off as an asset that some other business that is making a profit buys and writes off against its own profits.