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.

The coalition plans to secure 10 to 15 offtake contracts over the next 8 to 10 years. Frontier is specifically targeting technologies capable of storing carbon for over 1,000 years, think direct air capture and enhanced rock weathering, not tree planting. The goal is gigaton-scale removal at costs below $100 per ton.

The AI energy problem in the room

Here’s the thing about Anthropic joining a carbon removal coalition. AI companies are, by virtually any measure, making the carbon problem worse before they make it better. Google’s own emissions have risen substantially in recent years, driven in large part by its AI infrastructure buildout.

But irony aside, there’s a pragmatic argument here. If AI companies are going to consume massive amounts of energy regardless, funding the development of permanent carbon removal technologies is at least a more credible approach than buying cheap forestry offsets of questionable quality. Frontier’s focus on durable, measurable, thousand-year storage represents a meaningfully different standard.

What this means for investors

The $1.8 billion total commitment number is significant, but it’s worth putting in perspective. The carbon removal industry is still nascent. Frontier’s role is essentially to provide the demand signal that unlocks private investment in these companies, many of which are venture-backed startups burning through capital on R&D.

For investors watching the carbon removal space, Frontier’s growing war chest creates a more attractive risk profile. Startups with Frontier offtake agreements effectively have guaranteed revenue from some of the world’s most creditworthy corporations.

The key metric to watch going forward is whether Frontier’s investments actually push removal costs toward that sub-$100-per-ton target.