Frontier, the corporate coalition designed to jumpstart permanent carbon removal technologies, just got bigger and richer. The initiative announced $915 million in new funding commitments on June 17, bringing its total pledges to $1.8 billion since launching in 2022.
The headline addition isn’t just the money. It’s Anthropic, the AI safety company behind Claude, joining a roster that already includes Stripe, Google, Shopify, Meta, and JPMorgan Chase.
How Frontier actually works
Frontier operates as an advance market commitment, or AMC. In English: a bunch of wealthy buyers promise to purchase a product before it fully exists, giving suppliers the confidence to invest in building it.
The model was borrowed directly from global health. AMCs were famously used to accelerate pneumococcal vaccine development for low-income countries. Frontier applies the same logic to carbon removal, a field where promising technologies exist but struggle to attract capital because they’re expensive and unproven at scale.
